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Interesting opinion piece from the conservative David Brooks, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12brooks.html
the Republican Partys knee-jerk response to many problems is: Throw a voucher at it. Schools are bad. Throw a voucher. Health care systems a mess. Replace it with federally funded individual choice. Economic anxiety? Lower some tax rate.
The latest example of the mismatch between ideology and reality is the housing crisis. The partys individualist model cannot explain the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time. A Republican administration intervened gigantically in the market to handle the Bear Stearns, Freddie and Fannie debacles. But it has no conservative rationale to explain its action, no language about the importance of social equilibrium it might use to justify itself.
