Typical Big Government Reasoning

This time from Bill Clinton, speaking in favor of health care reform. What about the details of the bill? They don't matter, according to the former president.

"It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to pass, to move, to start the ball rolling," Mr. Clinton said. "And whatever they can get the votes for, I'm going to support."

Nothing is more important than just enlarging the size of the government, and getting its fingers deeper into the health care system. According to Clinton, "doing nothing was the worst outcome." How typical is that? It doesn't matter that the bill has all sorts of problem, or that there may be far better ideas for reform, to big government types, the government "doing something" is always the answer.

Fortunately there are a few Democrats with the rudimentary logical reasoning power to point out the obvious flaw in that sort of thinking. Senator Ben Nelson noted, "failure could be passing a bad bill." For some reason, the possibility (and often the high probability) that government intervention could make a bad situation worse just doesn't register. Unfortunately, things can always get worse. It's far easier to cause new problems than fix existing ones.