Mitt Romney, Republican socialist

Via our friend Josh Hendrickson, Gov. Romney of Massachusetts wrote an op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal that defended his support of Massachusetts' descent into socialized medicine.

I got home a while ago, so I'll more thoroughly criticize it tomorrow (hopefully). Let me say tonight that Romney's article is pure tripe. "Personal responsibility" my eye -- how can he invoke that term when it's all about government coercing people into buying something they otherwise wouldn't? "Personal responsibility" would be letting people decide for themselves.

Also, as I said in a comment on Josh's blog, Romney is making the classic liberal mistake of confusing health insurance and health care. He wrote, "someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided," which is nothing short of moronic. "Someone has to pay" only because government is now coercing people into a statist plan of universal health insurance. Then he concluded the paragraph, "A free ride on government is not libertarian", as if any real libertarians are calling for that?

And George W. Bush is accused by a lot of conservatives of being a big government Republican. Ha! I really don't understand what Romney is doing, unless he really just wants to out himself as a socialist. Maybe he's trying to get support for a 2008 White House run as Hillary's running mate.