You think when you are 65 years old you would be willing to trade Medicare, the absolute best medical care in the world that can never be taken away from you no matter how sick you are, for the uncertainty of buying insurance from a profit making company whose interests are diametrically opposed to your own and can cancel your coverage and deny care without recourse?

You haven't thought it through.

But James, you haven't anwered the most important question

Yes, I have.

Not only do you conservatives voluntarily enroll in Medicare the minute you are eligible but once enrolled you never campaign to have it taken away from you or to have your benefits cut.

If socialized medicine is good enough for you when you are in most need of medical care why isn't it good enough for you now?

Since the advent of Medicare I have never heard of single solitary conservative who was willing to refrain from gaining the advantage of its socialized medical care.

So...you'd expect people who have money taken from them their entire lives to refrain from collecting the benefits? Especially when the law essentially forces them to do so, since their private insurance conveniently expires once they're "eligible" for Medicare?

Believe me, most conservatives would happily have a refund of their money and the ability to keep their own insurance.

Since the advent of Medicare I have never heard of single solitary conservative who was willing to refrain from gaining the advantage of its socialized medical care. Unless you tell us otherwise I will assume you will swallow your principals and happily enroll in the best socialized medical plan in the world as well.

If it is good enough for you when you are in most need of it why isn't it good enough for you now?

Yes, and there is a deep reason for that. Fact is, the political world is an incredibly complex space. Ideologies are incredibly simplisitic models of what one percieves to be the driving factors that make societies work. Human beings have never been able to come up with a model that even roughly approximates the dynamics of political life, and so we have never had an ideology that can effectivly predict the best way to deal with any contemporary reality.

Pure ideologues, including libertarians, are almost always comic-book figures precisely because it usually takes no more than five minutes of thought to discover situations where the ideology points toward clearly ridiculous outcomes.

Having a lack of strong principles is not a problem that we ever really encounter. The most frequent problem we face is that there are too many strong principles. All principles are simplistic theories, and it is simply a fact of life that to approximate known reality we need to devise many different principles. How those principles interact, and what we do when they point towards different outcomes is what political discourse always ends up dealing with.

To effectivly govern a society it is necessary to deal with reality (just as with trying to simply live a normal life). No ideology or "coherent" set of principles offers satisfactory answers to all of the challanges life throws at you. In the end, principles can only function as tools - to be applied when appropriate to hopefully drive a particular situation towards a desired end.

After 2300 years, we are still struggling to get out from under the absurd expectations that Plato gave us regarding the world of ideas.

As for me, I want to be in a health care system where between going bankrupt and dying, the government would allow me the grace of going bankrupt.

To date, the libertarian political movement remains pretty steadily anemic.

Yes that is what laws do but I believe we have gotten way to carry away with them and are suppressing the people. Humans must be allowed to be human. Otherwise they will blow up and do crazy things.

There are many on both sides that want to tell others what to do even when it has little or no impact on someone else.

Uh, I think the *real* problem with Kinsley's article is that it assumes that "intellectual coherence" is relevant to political success.

There is that, yes.

Want government to "get out of your personal life"? Sure says the left about abortion, recreational drugs or gay marriage, but what about requiring health insurance, lowering taxes or forcing contributions to SSI. And of course just the reverse for republicans.

I think that is why the republicans have tended to attract the libertarians to a greater degree. Reduce the size of the non-military federal government works for most republicans and libertarians. And then they compromise on the 'social issues' by citing federalism and lets move this issue down to a more local level. Of course there are exceptions to this (and laws such as the perscription drug bill certainly don't enhance the republican brand for smaller government) but in general both groups can fit under the same tent.

For the democrats, it is pretty hard to make room for the libertarians under their tent with the shrines to affirmative action, teacher unions and nationalizing health care.