WHERE THERE'S WILL, THERE'S W'S WAY:

A politically-charged question for the candidates (George F. Will, May 30, 2007, Daily News Tribune)

Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.

Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity.

Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.

Hence liberals' hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education's semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual's Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of Health Savings Accounts (individuals who purchase high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses - just as car owners do not buy automobile insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals' advocacy of government responsibility for - and, inevitably, rationing of - health care, which is 16 percent of the economy, and rising.

Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction - public employees and their unions.

Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered.

Mr. Will was one of the ,more vocal sufferers of Conservative Derangement Syndrome, but the midterm appears to have sobered him up. He sounds like a W flack these days.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 30, 2007 7:10 PM