Obama's Opportunity to show Rigourous Liberalism

So, taking up the idea of "rigorous liberalism" I mentioned the other day, and accepting that there is a (ever less so) difference between what Americans and British mean by "liberalism", it seems an opportunity has popped up for Obama to display some.  With the Republicans now capable of blocking his health care plan, they last night demanded he go back to the drawing board.

"Rigorous liberalism" could just about save his skin, and is a good example for what I mean by the phrase.  Instead of just accepting that health care is unaffordable for many Americans and creating some compulsory system whereby everyone has to help pay for everyone else, he could look at why health care is unaffordable.  For most of it is down to previous and current actions of government.  

It would be far more effective first to eradicate those aspects of state interference that cause the unaffordability in the first place, because this is itself an injustice on those who do lose out by it, than to allow such injustices to continue and then to impose yet more injustices - higher taxes, loss of choice, decisions made by bureaucratic number-crunchers (or "death panels") rather than patients and their medical advisers.

Only once they have eradicated all state created and state enforced protectionism and price gauging can they even begin to calculate whether further help is needed for people who really cannot afford even basic care.  And there is a lot of it - and most of these apply just as much here as in the US and would be usefully deployed in reforming health care here too by any liberal thinking government - not that there's much chance of getting one of those because we don't have anyone standing on such a platform!

Rather than sum them up here, I'll hand you over to the wonderful Kevin Carson, writing this time in the Foundation for Economic Education's periodical "The Freeman".

Now, I ask you, what politician would not love to find this holy grail of being able to claim credit for having arranged it for everyone to get affordable health care without vast increases in tax and bureaucracy and all the rest of it?  There can be only one conclusion: the politician who cares more about vested interests than the people who elected him.  Electoral oblivion is too good for such reprehensible scum-suckers.