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The Worst Slippery Slope Argument Ever Made By Anyone Not Antonin Scalia

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The policy successes of the ACA has led to plenty of evasive maneuvers. Still, I think Kevin Williamson might have the very silliest:

Let’s assume that the Bay Area partisans are correct in their high estimation of the metropolis. What might we do with that information? Why not pass a law requiring everybody in the United States to live there? As with the Affordable Care Act’s approach to health insurance, we wouldn’t be forcing an inferior product on people; we’d be forcing them to drop their second-rate cities for something better. Sorry, Cleveland — you can’t keep your crappy city, so deal with it. There would be some great economies of scale at work, and there are well-known economic benefits associated with population density, which we’d have in spades with a population of 300 million. (Though if we define the Bay Area broadly, we’d still have a lower population density than Manhattan, on average.) We could drop altogether thousands and thousands of redundancies — of school districts, police departments, fire departments, planning and zoning codes, tax laws, city councils. The rest of the country could be turned into farmland or left to revert to wilderness. Think of the efficiency we could achieve.

One could point out the many differences between cities and health insurance markets — starting with the fact that every other liberal democracy in the world manages to provide decent minimum standard of health care to all while maintaining a healthy diversity of urban and rural living areas — but, really, why bother? The whole “you know how to build roads and police departments and sewer systems better than the gubmit so why should you pay taxes argument” is so stale and asinine rebuttal is superfluous.

I am, however, offended that having made a dumb cliched argument he didn’t go all the way:

Once we’ve decided where everybody should live, we can move on to the question of what they should eat.

[…]

Perhaps that’s not the way to go. We might consider the USDA’s thinking here, or the economic case for the “cheapest, most nutritious, most bountiful food in human history,” that being the McDonald’s double cheeseburger.

No, no, no, no. Everyone knows that when those USDA bureaucrats get their way Americans will be faced with the existential terror of bring forced to eat broccoli. It has already been established by the kind of people who believe that everyone having access to a doctor will crush the human spirit itself that if the federal government can address the free rider problem in health care insurance markets, nothing can stop it from addressing the, er, free rider problem in broccoli markets. What is the free rider problem in broccoli markets? Glad you asked! Uh…look, its Zombie Mancur Olson!

Anyway, NRO readers are supposed to pretend that having bad cheeseburgers with no exotic condiments like so-called “Dijon mustard” for every meal would be awesome, so the argument fails on its own terms. I ask you — would Jonah Goldberg make such a rookie mistake?

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