Every once in a while I run some boiled-down e-mails I’ve gotten over the last few weeks (sometimes months) and responses.

#1: What’s with the dissing of evangelicals? You do realize that Republicans can’t win elections without them. Your focus on non-evangelical voters is weird: Evangelicals vote too.

The reader is commenting on this post about Huckabee. I’ve got nothing against evangelicals. Some of my favorite candidates are evangelicals. I just don’t think there are enough evangelicals in this country to make it at all likely that a candidate can win if he has very little appeal to other voters. I’d be skeptical of a Catholic Republican who pumped up his numbers among co-religionists while alienating other voters. The difference is that there are enough evangelical Republicans to make this route tempting to an evangelical candidate.

#2: You seem like a reasonable conservative. But you just spout the party line about taxes. What has you so convinced that returning to the tax rates of the Clinton ’90s would be a disaster?

Thanks, I think. I don’t think those tax rates would be a disaster. But I doubt the tax increases would stop there; and we had demographic and technological advantages in the ’90s that we don’t have now.

#3: People who say that Romney can’t win [the nomination] because of health care are like people who said McCain couldn’t [win] because of immigration. Look how that turned out.

(I have had a number of posts arguing that Romneycare is going to be very hard for the governor to overcome.) Immigration split conservatives in 2008. The issue probably helped McCain clinch the nomination by helping him win Hispanics by a huge margin in the Florida primary. Health care doesn’t similarly split conservative voters, and it’s connected to a theme — limited government — that is central to conservatives’ self-understanding. I may be wrong, but I think it’s going to be a tougher issue. And of course McCain’s path to the nomination isn’t a strategy that anyone would recommend to a candidate.

#4: So first you say that you want more inflation. Then you go ballistic when someone says that the Fed has produced the result you want. I don’t understand, I really don’t.

This e-mail refers to a post I wrote about Niall Ferguson, who is convinced we already have double-digit inflation. I don’t actually want more inflation. I want higher growth in nominal incomes/spending, and I’m willing to take it in the form of higher inflation if I must. I think the Fed has raised inflation and inflation expectations a bit. But not anywhere close to where Ferguson says it is.