Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success . . . . Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to 'keep insurance companies honest' - and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest.

Most problems, decisions, and performances are multidimensional, but somehow the results have to be reduced to a few key indicators which are to be institutionally rewarded or penalized... The need to reduce the indicators to a manageable few is based not only on the need to conserve the time (and sanity) of those who assign rewards and penalties, but also to provide those subject to these incentives with some objective indication of what their performance is expected to be and how it will be judged... key indicators can never tell the whole story.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.

The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.