Thanks for flagging that article, Kevin. Noah gets a lot wrong in presenting his case for the Democrats’ student-loan takeover (omitting, for instance, any mention of the early ’90s federal accounting change that made government lending appear cheaper than subsidized lending, even though the cost of the underlying activity remained essentially unchanged). But he gets the fundamental point right. Don’t listen to any Democrat who tries to tell you that this is a “centrist” bill because it works through the private sector. There are three steps to a process like this:

1. Subsidize an activity through the private sector, gradually getting the public to think of the subsidy as an entitlement. Student loans are a perfect example. The idea that the government shouldn’t subsidize tuition is considered highly radical today, even though, as Cato’s Neal McCluskey points out, we have decades of evidence that these subsidies have just been captured by tuition-hiking universities. (Do you think it’s a coincidence that, as universities have grown rich from public money, they have filled to the brim with advocates for a much more robust federal government?)

2. Create a “public option” allowing the government to provide the activity directly. Promote the public option using the rhetoric of the free market, arguing that the only way to control costs in the private sector (which have risen because the private sector has become increasingly good at capturing the subsidies) is to force it to “compete” with a public provider.

3. Rig the accounting to show that the public option costs less than the subsidized private alternatives. Promote the complete federalization of the activity by fulminating against the “fat cat” private actors who have had a “nice ride” courtesy of the taxpayers but who aren’t offering any benefits that the government can’t match. Develop amnesia regarding previous arguments about the benefits of public vs. private competition. Dismiss anyone who argues that the government shouldn’t have gotten involved in the activity in the first place as a radical throwback.

This is the process by which a basically conservative citizenry can be made to accept radical changes in its relationship with and dependence on the federal government. As others have argued, and as federal college-loan policy shows, last night’s establishment of government-subsidized health insurance for all is the beginning, not the end, of that process.