Liberals are all for individuals’ freedom and democracy except where the result doesn’t correspond to what they would like to see, at which point they start to meddle. That’s how we end up with what is essentially an attempt to reinvent caste.

The result is always a mess, for several reasons:

- Liberals can’t even agree amongst themselves on what outcome they would like to see (as in this quite typical case, where they can’t settle on who the victims are).

- Liberals are resistant to thinking in terms of tradeoffs, because a need for tradeoffs implies that perfect solutions are not available. They prefer to oscillate between momentary enthusiasms.

- Liberals always exhibit a strong preference for administratively complex systems, because to them it’s a prerequisite that the outcome should be rigged in favor of the relatively educated and articulate.

- The opportunity to hand out publicly-funded benefits and preferences like bon-bons is just too much fun to give up. They can’t stop themselves. Even when public benefits (like subsidized housing and welfare) turn out to have disastrous effects, playing with whole segments of society as they were toy trains is just too much fun.

One day our descendants will learn how to teach basic economics and accounting to most of the population. This will transform society as much as our society was transformed when most people learned to read and write. At that point our current period will seem an age of primitive, ignorant squabbling.