Timothy Noah, Charles Murray, and America’s Inequality : The New Yorker

Timothy Noah, Charles Murray, and America’s Inequality : The New Yorker: A full sense of what conservatives object to in the Obama program can be hard to extract from daily conservative discourse. Cost provides this. You can put on his glasses and see that “Obamacare” looks like a set of deals with privileged health-care companies that got a seat at the bargaining table, that the stimulus and the financial rescue were ways of helping banks and unions that contributed to the 2008 campaign, that cap-and-trade environmental legislation was a way of rewarding big environmental groups and corporations. Even the underlying problems that these initiatives were meant to address don’t strike him as having to do with the national interest: you might favor universal health-care as an anti-inequality measure, but Cost views it as just another goody for non-majoritarian groups trying to claw more from the government. The liberal conversation has exactly the same limits: the impulse to see conservative causes as payoffs to interest groups—and conservative political successes as demonstrations of structural flaws in the political system—is well-nigh irresistible.