Thinking and feeling

A conservatism that can state a comeback will have to do both | Marvin Olasky

Frum

David Frum's Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (Doubleday, 2008) is "the first fresh thinking from the Right in over a decade," according to his publicist, and has numerous "ground-breaking ideas."

Watch that hype. Most of Frum's specifics are sound but hardly new: For example, Frum is right to assert, "Almost everything wrong with American health care can be traced to the malign effects of perverse government policies" regarding taxes, regulations, spending, and litigation: "The U.S. health care system is not a 'free-market' system and only barely a 'private' system."

He points out that state governments decide what and who must be insured. Must-insure mandates mean that a health insurance policy for a 25-year-old man in high-regulation New Jersey costs nearly six times as much as one in Kentucky. The solution is competition, with consumers allowed to buy insurance for themselves with untaxed dollars.