There are two crucial points to make about this.

First, the “50-state public-private hybrid” represents the compromise that was necessary to get enough Democratic votes to pass the bill. Not even with the largest Democratic congressional supermajority you will ever see in your lifetime were there enough Democratic votes for the progressives’ fantasy of universal, single-payer health care. But, as the experience of Massachusetts’s 1990s-era reforms suggests, when the partial socialization of medicine fails, the socialists will cry out for more socialism. That’s why many Democrats, and perhaps the president himself, may seem relatively unconcerned by Obamacare’s disastrous rollout. They don’t want a hybrid solution to succeed completely. They would much rather capitalize on its failure — or at least its problems — to make the case for universal, single-payer healthcare.

Second, Foer laments that, “fortunately for the New Deal, Twitter didn’t broadcast every farmer’s sad encounter with the Agriculture Adjustment Act.” Well, the real problem with the Agricultural Adjustment Act was not its impact on farmers, who benefited from the cartels created by the Act, but rather its impact on everyday American consumers, who had to pay much more for food than necessary during very hard times, and never even realized that they were being gouged by one of the New Deal’s many disguised forced-transfer schemes. And here’s the cardinal point. The main problem with progressive policies is not that they end up hurting their intended beneficiaries, which they usually do, but rather that they impose massive, hidden social losses on everyone else. And Twitter still doesn’t broadcast those sad losses, which is why Americans still support so many of these terrible policies.