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Here are the editors of National Review on the individual mandate provision of the healthcare reform bill:

The mandate highlights the coercive and obnoxious character of Obamacare as a whole. The whole scheme works, to the extent it works, only if people are forced to buy a product they would not buy on a free market.

And here is Jim Manzi, in the current issue of National Review, explaining that Social Security as a tax-supported pension plan should be dismantled:

Instead, we should have a defined-contribution pension program requiring individuals to contribute a reasonable proportion of their income (though some flexibility should be allowed) to an array of investment vehicles to which they hold property rights.

Granted, there’s no requirement that every contributor to National Review has to agree with its official editorial positions. But converting Social Security from a tax-supported program into one where people are instead required to buy private retirement annuities is a pretty mainstream conservative view. So what are we to make of the proposition that forcing people to buy retirement annuities is OK but forcing them to buy healthcare insurance isn’t?

Beats me. But I figure there are two possibilities. (1) They don’t really think a healthcare mandate is “obnoxious” at all. It’s just a handy talking point. (2) They do think the mandate is obnoxious, and they think the same thing about private Social Security accounts. And if they ever succeed in getting them, they’ll immediately file suit in federal court to have the whole program declared unconstitutional.

But which is it? Decisions, decisions.