Wyatt argues that Harvard students, when asked by non-Harvard-affiliates where they go to school, should answer honestly and without hesitation. He notes that Harvard students tend to evade the question by answering, “in Boston… in Cambridge… yeah.” Wyatt writes,

This is when it gets really awkward. Now your acquaintance knows you were trying to conceal that you go to Harvard, and will assume this is because you didn’t want to hurt his or her simple feelings about being so much stupider than you. You’ve succeeded, by trying to avoid looking arrogant and condescending, in exhibiting both qualities.

I completely agree. Moreover, I think our embarrassment to “drop the H bomb” stems from privilege guilt—and that evading privilege is never effective.

I first wrote about this kind of situation just after making my college decision:

Parent: You’re a senior in high school, right? Where are you going to school next year?

Me: …in Boston.

Parent: Oh? Boston College or Boston University?

Me: (laughs nervously.) Oh. Actually, I’m going to Harvard.

Parent: HARVARD?! (laughs nervously.) Really?! THE Harvard?

….

Me: (giggles like a maniac to maintain the impression that I am actually a normal person and not an elitist Harvard freak)

Apparently I, too, used to be one of those awkward “I go to school in Boston” types. However, I’ve since come around.

In general, I do avoid wearing Harvard gear when I’m running or walking around Boston or Cambridge. People smile at me more, or at least I imagine that they do. After all, Harvard hasn’t exactly had the best relationship with the community around it: between the nonexistent Allston Science Complex, measly Payments in Lieu of Taxes, layoffs from Cambridge’s largest employer, and jaywalking students, the name “Harvard” wouldn’t exactly inspire warm and fuzzy feelings if I were a non-Harvard-affiliated Cambridge resident.

Nonetheless, whenever I have discussed my college with a new acquaintance from home or from Boston, I have encountered only positive reactions to “Harvard.” In general, the people I meet are either genuinely proud of me, or they simply don’t care that I go to the most selective college in the country.

And that’s good. After all, Harvard is very similar to other prestigious schools (for example, the University of Chicago.) Reserving special attention for the fact that we go to Harvard only serves to compound the extraordinary and problematic mystique that surrounds our college. Instead, treating Harvard like we treat other schools and just telling people frankly where we go to college may help dispel the apparently universal stereotype of Harvard student “arrogance and snootiness.”

Being embarrassed of “Harvard” is a special kind of privilege guilt. Many people with privilege spend their whole lives feeling uncomfortable with the advantages they have (because of gender, social class, race, sexual orientation, language, intelligence), and thus ignoring them or feeling guilty. This is entirely unproductive.

Enrolling in Harvard does confer a lot of privilege. However, denying or downplaying that privilege fails to address the problematic power structures that make employers, high school peers, and potential dates gasp when we “drop the H-bomb.” Instead, I strive to recognize my privilege (it’s true, no one would read my posts if they appeared on my blogger and not the Harvard Political Review) and to use it for good by advocating for causes I believe in. I can thus take pride in my college’s name while demonstrating that Harvard students are not all arrogant snoots.

So perhaps Wyatt isn’t quite right to compare the H-bomb to a “band-aid that needs to be ripped off.” Instead of trying to prove to that parent that I was a normal person despite attending Harvard, I should have thought about it this way: I am a normal person. I go to Harvard. What now?

Image credit http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/uploads/images/article-images/harvard_gate1.jpg

In response to our recent Crimson editorial, “Reclaiming Goldstone’s Missed Opportunity,” Abdelnasser Rashid writes today that “[i]n fact, Goldstone did not retract the most damning accusations of the more than 500-page report.” He dubs our characterization of Goldstone’s op-ed in the Washington Post as a “retraction” a “dangerous misreading.” Mr. Rashid asks “where is the retraction” of any key charge? In fact, he asserts, there is only “one incident which Goldstone says should be corrected.”

Given that Mr. Rashid’s interpretation of Goldstone’s remarks differs from nearly every mainstream account, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Perhaps with Goldstone’s own retraction in the op-ed in question:

While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

We quoted this verbatim in our editorial. As we wrote there, Goldstone’s report claimed that “the Jewish state had intentionally and systematically targeted civilians for massacre.” He has now retracted this unprecedented and “most damning” accusation. It appears Mr. Rashid missed this fact in both Goldstone’s original piece and in our own.

But the New York Times didn’t. Here’s what they wrote in an article entitled “Israel Grapples With Retraction on U.N. Report”:

The disavowal, by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who led a panel of experts for the United Nations, appeared in an opinion article in The Washington Post. He said that he no longer believed that Israel had intentionally killed Palestinian civilians during its invasion of Gaza.

The Economist, too, seems to be in on our “dangerous misreading”:

… Richard Goldstone’s public recantation of the charge that Israel may have deliberately killed non-combatants in Gaza two years ago.
The charge was a key element of the Goldstone Report…

But wait, didn’t Goldstone merely take back (not “retract,” of course) “one incident,” as Mr. Rashid asserts? Yes, Goldstone does indeed offer only one specific instance in his op-ed where Israel was innocent of the charge of civilian targeting. But what The Times, Economist and major media noticed – and Mr. Rashid somehow did not – is that Goldstone prefaced that paragraph with two important words. Let us pick up from where the original retraction quote above left off:

… civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.
For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home…

After repudiating his earlier charge that Israel purposefully targeted civilians, Goldstone then takes up the “most serious [Israeli] attack” criticized in the Goldstone Report – and shows how it was not the result of intent. In other words, he takes the strongest alleged instance of Israeli misconduct in his report and defangs it. This is given as a powerful “example” of his broader contention that Israel did not target civilians as policy. We invite readers to review Goldstone’s original editorial in context and see who is misreading it – we, the NY Times and the Economist, or Mr. Rashid.

We wish to draw attention to one last pundit who seems to have understood Goldstone very differently than Mr. Rashid, one who is not generally known as a right-wing Israeli apologist:

Goldstone’s volte-face appears in the form of a Washington Post op-ed. It’s a bizarre effort. He says his report would have been different “if I had known then what I know now.” The core difference the judge identifies is that he’s now convinced Gaza “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

This pundit is Roger Cohen. We found his op-ed posted as a response to our editorial on the web site of the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee. It seems the committee misread Goldstone’s op-ed as a “retraction” as well.

The purpose of our editorial was to avoid the partisan paradigms that too often characterize the Israel-Palestine discourse, and instead push the conversation forward into a constructive discussion regarding reducing civilian casualties during asymmetrical conflicts. Some, like Mr. Rashid, will attempt to force our editorial into a particular political box – one which bears little relation to the piece’s contents or the reality it addresses. We hope, however, that considerate readers will approach the article in the spirit in which it was written, and use it as a platform for thoughtful and productive debate over very important questions.

Avishai D. Don
Beth I. Drucker
Yair Rosenberg

Photo Credit: Flickr (BlatantNews.com)

Daniel Handlin and Nicholas Tatsis on Prioritizing America’s Defense

Defense spending is a crucial element of the American economy and “some common misconceptions” often mislead the public into supporting cuts to defense programs, argue Nicholas Tatsis and Daniel Handlin in a recent op-ed for The Crimson. Contending that we must approach military spending with a focus on our long-term defense capability needs rather than yearly attempts to pare down the budget, Tatsis and Handlin conclude by saying that as the 21st century begins, the “U.S. defense industry… (should and must continue) to help America sustain its safety and primacy and assist our brave men and women on the front lines.”

Read the full article at The Crimson.

Dylan Matthews on Moving the Bounds of the Possible

Many people have raised objections to President Obama’s decision to become military involved in Libya and, in a piece for his personal blog, Dylan Matthews argues a less common point concerning our military involvement. Taking Obama at face value that our mission in Libya is one strictly for humanitarian purposes, Matthews argues that if our money was instead spent on anti-malaria bednets, we would both save money and more lives than we are in Libya. Matthews synthesizes the viewpoints of a variety of bloggers in his piece, describing his agreements or disagreements with various syndicates.

Read the full article at Dylan Matthews’ personal blog.

Josh Lipson on The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Facebook

In light of a new Facebook poll that asks viewers which side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they are on, The Harvard Political Review‘s Josh Lipson writes that the differences reflected in such polls are merely an off-shoot of simple tribalism. Lipson explains that this feeling, “at its best explains why I derive pride from the Israeli flag on my wall and stir when I hear HaTikva, but at its worst accounts for Baruch Goldstein and the bombed-out buses of the Intifada.”

Read the full article at The Harvard Political Review.

Maya Jonas-Silver on Religious Speakers Draw Ire, Protests

In a recent article for The Crimson, Maya Jonas-Silver describes the controversy surrounding the recent Social Transformation Conference held at Harvard. The event, which especially garnered criticism from LGBT student organizations, featured multiple individuals who had made “inflammatory” statements in their pasts. Some attendees, however, disagreed with this criticism and praised the power of the speakers’ messages.

Read the full article at The Crimson.

Louis R. Evans on Tempest in the Tea

In his recent op-ed for The Crimson, Louis R. Evans describes the convoluted interpretation of the Constitution by congressional Republicans. Despite their alleged “strict constructionism” and insistence on textually applying the Constitution to laws they pass, their reasoning is flawed in that they attempt to statically interpret a text that was meant to evolve with our nation.

Read the full article at The Crimson.

Mike Cotter on The Practical Constitution

The question of the Health Care Reform Bill’s constitutionality has left significant uncertainty within the health system and widespread speculation as to what the Supreme Court will rule when they inevitably hear the case. Mike Cotter of The Perspective writes that there is little question what the ruling should be in this case as, the only coherent opposition to the statute is one that ignores the entire body of legal precedent that stands between us and the Constitution.” In his in-depth discussion of the Health Care Reform Bill and constitutional law, Cotter takes on the issue of Constitutional Originalism and the idea of a more practical constitution.

Read the full article at The Perspective.

Paul Schied on Libya and American Leadership

Paul Schied of The Harvard Political Review takes the recent US bombings Libya as an opportunity to reveal important aspects of American leadership abroad. Combining his perspectives on Obama’s recent speech on Libya, Congressman Barney Frank’s lecture at Pforzheimer House, and a discussion with HKS Professor Emeritus Marvin Kalb, Schied delves into the intricacies of America’s world leadership position. And while Schied admits that “in the past we have sometimes taken our responsibility to prevent humanitarian disasters too far,” he ultimately puts America’s leadership responsibility in a positive light.

Read the full article at The Harvard Political Review.

I don’t intend a comprehensive response, but I am curious about a few points:

On Dylan’s view, which I take to be an accurate representation of luck egalitarianism, would the system described still be the preferred admissions system if it made the worst off worse off? If Dylan’s system makes everyone worse off, in fact, under what conditions (if any) would it still be morally preferable to the current system (or a Rawlsian spin on the current system, as Sam seems to advocate)?

Another question:
Since Dylan seems concerned with multiple inequalities, and not just inequalities of talent or income, how comprehensive would the system be in trying to compensate for other inequalities? This is a kind of “where to draw the line” question which comes up in a lot of critiques of luck egalitarianism, I suppose, but I think there’s something to it. Would Dylan’s system try to compensate for, say, shortness, by admitting more short people to top universities?

Finally: Does Dylan’s perspective take talents as givens, as if they are part of a static “distribution” of goods? If people don’t just “get” talents, but choose to develop them based on the opportunities that are open to them, does that change anything about the argument? At minimum it would seem that these new rules of the game would discourage students from developing their diverse talents and encourage them to put all of their efforts into learning SAT tricks and inflating their GPA. That hardly seems like a laudable goal for a college admissions system.

Frank Caprio (Class of ’88) was the Democratic nominee in the Rhode Island gubernatorial race. During the race, Caprio caused quite a stir by telling President Obama to take his endorsement and “shove it”. Independent candidate Lincoln Chafee came away with the election. Here Caprio talks about the race, and his plans for the future.

It seems that your campaign for governor focused a lot on a plan for small business. How would you say that concerns about the current economic climate impacted these elections?

I think that it was one of the major factors in the elections I followed, and the one here in Rhode Island. Economic issues were always in the forefront. In Rhode Island, we had a little different landscape where we had multiple candidates for governor. We had an independent, and another party, so the vote was really split up.

What specific issues were people in Rhode Island focused on?

You know, people are either nervous about losing their job, or they’re out of work and looking for a job. Rhode Island has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, 12%. The results of the election definitely spelled that out. Oddly enough, myself and the two other candidates had very similar messages, that we needed to focus on the business climate, the tax climate, and make it friendlier. The message from Chafee was not so much focused on economic issues as it was on other issues. He was looking more at what was going on with public employees and their pensions, and saying that we needed to change those things. He was able to put together enough constituencies of people who weren’t really focused on the economy. They were more focused on how their issues were going to be impacted by the election, especially the unions.

So were there specific groups or segments of the vote that you had hoped to win and did not?

I don’t think it was really that. It was more that there were three candidates, and I was one of them, that had very similar messages about holding the line on taxes and having a more business friendly climate in Rhode Island. So that vote was divided amongst three candidates. And there was a fourth candidate (Chafee) whose message was to protect what was already in place for public employees or people who depend on the public sector for funding.

It seems there was a lot of controversy surrounding Obama’s visit to Rhode Island. Why do you think the President withheld his endorsement?

You’d have to ask him.

Did you know from the start that he would withhold it?

As I’ve said in the past, I wasn’t actively pursuing his endorsement. It wasn’t until he decided that he was going to come to Rhode Island to fundraise that it became an issue for the press, anyways.

So after this election, what’s next for Frank Caprio?

I’m keeping all my options open. I’ve had a nice week and a half, and I’ve been getting a lot of calls from people from different sectors. I have a background in business, law, and finance, and people in all three of those areas have contacted me.

Do you see a return to politics in the future?

Again, I’m not focusing on anything specific when it comes to elective office in the future, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

But the UC bill deserves our attention, if only because it underscores the absurdity of the past few weeks.

When Peretz came to campus last month to be honored for his service as a former Harvard professor, he was greeted by a mob of shouting students. In spite of their apparent outrage, the protestors – with a wink and a nod at the camera – seemed to take great pleasure in the man’s discomfort as they stalked him across Harvard Yard.

The whole scene was a little reminiscent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s invitation to speak at Columbia University three years ago — except in that case, the world’s leading holocaust-denier was allowed to hold forth and defend his views at length to a packed auditorium.

Nevertheless, after the crowd had reveled in their two minutes’ hate, Harvard accepted the donations in Peretz’s honor. Perhaps the University had decided, as Max Novendstern wrote at the time, that it was “strong enough and secure enough to embrace this sort of intellectual antagonism with a bit of fearlessness.”

Two weeks later, some students in the Social Studies lecture course indicated their dissatisfaction with this result by noisily walking out of lecture (much to the delight of the still-seated majority, I’ve heard, who just wanted to learn.)

Now, with all of the ardor of the Inquisition, the Undergraduate Council has called on President Faust to establish a “committee of concerned faculty, students, and administrators” to “investigate the decision” to honor Peretz.

(It is a shame that the administration didn’t show a little more “spine,” if you will, in defense of its decision at the time; a weak defense tends to invite a second attack.)

But what the UC reveals is the essential close-mindedness of those who fervently seek to ”condemn” Peretz. They are unable or unwilling to see him as an intellectual whose ideas can and should be contested — only as a heretic to be purged.

Protest of ROTC's policies toward homosexuals (at UW-Madison, 1990)

At Harvard’s Reserve Officer Training Corps commissioning ceremony this Wednesday, Drew Faust urged Harvard’s class of 2010 future officers to:

Help reinforce the long tradition of ties between Harvard and the military, as we share hopes that changing circumstances will soon enable us to further strengthen those bonds.

What does the vague latter half of her sentence mean? By
“changing circumstances,” she presumably means the possible repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. By further strengthening bonds, she presumably means reinstating ROTC on campus, ending a forty-year-old ban that has been in place since Harvard severed its ties with the program in 1969, in the wake of student and faculty protests against the Vietnam War.

Should we take Faust at her (admittedly circumspect) words?

Former military correspondent Tom Ricks told the HPR in an interview that if Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed, he will be surprised if Harvard does not recognize ROTC within five years (note: you can read the interview on our website, but the remarks to which I refer do not appear in the magazine. I will work on linking a full transcript).

In contrast, Brian Bolduc ’10 wrote in the Harvard Crimson earlier this year that such confidence underestimates the University’s deep-seated hostility towards the military.

Even if Congress repeals “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” ROTC will struggle to gain recognition.

Why the skepticism? Because excuses for the University’s policy have multiplied over time. Before 1993, students used ROTC’s exclusion of disabled people, President Ronald Reagan’s budgetary cuts to civilian aid, and the military’s discouragement of “openness and critical inquiry” as grounds to repel ROTC. The Harvard Crimson argued that the program would sully the University’s academic integrity. In 1989, the editorial board insisted, “ROTC should not return ever, under any circumstances.” Should Congress abolish DADT, more excuses will crop up. (emphasis mine)

Which imminent pundit is right, Ricks or Bolduc? Can we take Faust’s intimations seriously, or should we feel Bolduc’s mistrust?

It seems to me that Bolduc’s skepticism is understandable but overblown. The climate is favorable for ROTC’s reinstatement (assuming DADT gets repealed, which is far from inevitable). For conservatives, it might be satisfying to envision a faculty filled with troops-haters, but this is not the 60s. Faust has shown unprecedented support for ROTC—just read the full text of her speech from this Wednesday. The atmosphere at Harvard is mildly pro-military. Bolduc’s skepticism is understandable, but I wonder what “more excuses” could plausibly “crop up.” Since Harvard has centered all of its official criticism of ROTC around DADT, the University should find it difficult, if not impossible, to continue the ban on other grounds if the law is repealed.

I think Herz-Roiphe puts his finger on the problem when he talks about the “imbalance of control” that pervades the final club scene. Men throw the parties, buy the booze, choose the music, pay the rent, deal with alumni, decide who gets in, and judge (implicitly but also explicitly) who’s attractive, who’s fun, who’s cool, etc. Even when this control entails serious responsibility (i.e. the liabilities that come with hosting huge parties on a college campus every week), the mindset it perpetuates is one that says, men will take care of everything and women just have to “smile and look pretty,” as one interviewee of Herz-Roiphe put it.

Herz-Roiphe also takes down the oft-heard counter-argument that, so long as women are forming their own clubs, we don’t have to worry about the state of gender relations on campus. First, he points out the obvious, which is that female final clubs don’t have the sort of prestige, wealth, or alumni network that the male clubs do. Second, and more controversially, he says that, even if the clubs were equal, separateness wouldn’t be desirable. I really appreciate his willingness to take on this question. In my opinion, we don’t need any more institutionalized single-gender camaraderie. It’s already the case that most people, most of the time, associate with and befriend people of the same gender. When this natural habit is unnecessarily institutionalized, the inevitable result is to create a sense of “otherness” surrounding the opposite gender. The solution to the good old boys’ network, men in power privileging other men because they’re “like them,” is not to create a good old girls’ network that can do the same thing for women. The solution is to break down the gender divide, on the assumption (which some people might contest, admittedly) that men and women are equals in all relevant respects.

In the Crimson‘s comment section, a lot of people have been criticizing Herz-Roiphe for himself being a member of a final club. But I actually gave his article greater, not lesser, weight because of this alleged hypocrisy. Herz-Roiphe, unlike most critics of the final club scene, knows whereof he speaks. And he can probably do more to change things than can five or ten or twenty critics who aren’t final club members, myself included. If he felt this strongly about final clubs three years ago, when he joined, the hypocrisy would be more concerning. But my hunch is that his views have probably evolved over the years.

I also want to respond to one of the sillier critiques offered in the comment section, which is that everybody and everything is discriminatory, including (or especially) Harvard itself, so we should leave final clubs alone. Look at the (il)logic of that kind of argument. Imagine if someone said, “Lots of laws are discriminatory, so let’s leave Jim Crow alone. Lots of leaders are evil, so let’s leave Hitler alone. Lots of people are poor, so let’s leave starving children alone.” I’m not saying final clubs are comparable to any of those things; I’m just drawing attention to the rottenness of a certain kind of argument, which we only find intuitively satisfying in some cases because the stakes are relatively low (or seem that way).

Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong in the comments.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Such exhortations often contain an ambiguity, and Carillo’s is no exception. Is he criticizing liberals on substantive grounds, i.e. for their support for separation of church and state and their “neutral stance on issues of faith”? Or is he just saying they need to get better at speaking in the code of religiosity, i.e. they need better messaging and marketing? He says, for instance, that Democratic candidates in 2010 should “emulate” Obama’s religious outreach and try to “shed the stereotype of condescension toward faith.” It seems incongruous to talk about the Social Gospel and Martin Luther King if all you really want is for Democrats to improve their marketing tactics and stop being allergic to speaking in churches.

Unless, that is, Carillo wants Democrats to shed their anti-religious image by actually becoming a more or less sectarian political party like the GOP and rejecting secularism outright. Perhaps his vision is of a two-party system: evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and Mormons on the right; liberal Protestants, reformist Catholics, and Jews on the left. The rich American tradition of secularism, and the vibrant American nonreligious community, would seem to have no place in such a system. Perhaps they’d form a third party?

Now of course I’m just riffing on Carrillo’s column. I’m sure he doesn’t want to kick secularists out of the Democratic Party. But it’s not clear whether he buys into the misconception that today’s secular liberals have “socioeconomic concerns detached from moral premises,” or whether he just thinks that’s an image problem. Carrillo’s historical narrative, including his praise for “Social Gospel theologians, Catholic priests and nuns in the social justice tradition, and Reformed Jewish lawyers,” unfortunately implies the former—that modern liberals have gotten away from their genuine moral (read: religious) roots.

But secularists are not “detached from moral premises” at all. And they participated actively in all the major liberal movements that Carrillo mentions. Carrillo says, “The Civil Rights movement was cultivated in Southern Black Baptist churches,” implying, of course, that it was cultivated there only. The role of secularists and humanists in the Civil Rights movement is tragically under-appreciated. King’s close friend, adviser, and speechwriter Stanley Levison was a nonreligious Jew. As were Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, the two Northerners who were murdered along with a local black man, James Chaney, by Klansmen in 1964. As was Viola Liuzzo, a middle-aged mother and activist from Detroit murdered in 1965 while driving between Selma and Montgomery. There was a reason the Civil Rights movement was called “communistic” and “atheistic” by its white opponents.

Carrillo’s claim that the “feminist, environmental, and anti-war movements were spiritual if not religious in nature” is particularly confused. First, it’s not even clear what this means. Does it mean that all those whose political beliefs are “moral” in some way, as opposed to “technocratic,” are spiritual if not religious? If so, it seems a desperate attempt to steal good people and good ideas away from the humanists and the secularists and to claim them for the “spiritual” and the religious. But the feminist movement, for one, was an obvious rebuke to the traditional and, for many, religiously mandated division of family labor. If that was “spiritual,” the word loses all meaning.

Of course, Carrillo is not wrong to say that politicians must speak to the “whole human,” and appeal to moral premises as well as material interests. But he’s wrong in thinking, or at least implying, that the religious have a monopoly on moral premises and on connection to the “whole human.”

Invocation of public opinion without acknowledging that majorities favor the actual policies just enacted when they are described? Check.

“Government takeover of health care”? Check.

Moaning about how the bill isn’t “post-partisan,” while ignoring the fact that Republicans were never going to vote for any Obama-supported health care bill? Check.

Bland assertion that Republicans and Democrats agree that we need to reform health care, while ignoring that Republicans never demonstrated one iota of interest in health care reform when they were in power? Check.

Citation of Lanny Davis as if he could possibly know that Republicans would have voted Aye on anything? That one seems unique to Motley and Weatherl, but still, check.

Rote recitation of the phrase “along party lines” as if Republicans don’t bear responsibility for that outcome? Check.

Needlessly specific accounting of the number of pages consumed by the legislation, as if that figure means anything? Check.

The “16 percent of the economy” line? Check.

Selective quoting of the CBO and refusal to cite its deficit-reduction predictions? Check.

Ridiculing of the fact that Democrats actually propose to pay for their new program? Check.

Acknowledgment of the reason why health care can’t be treated like a market good (moral hazard) combined with the recommendation that it be treated essentially like a market good? Check plus for using the term “moral hazard”!

It’s a wonder the Crimson doesn’t just start syndicating Bill Kristol if this is what it publishes when it finally finds Republican commentators.