David Beito’s post and Radley Balko’s Foxnews.com column remind me of something big-government right-winger George Will wrote in the 1980s. He chided conservatives for saying that the government cannot competently set minimum wages or provide health care, because if people come to believe that, how will they be persuaded that the government can effect regime change in other countries? (He had Cuba in mind back then.) This constitutes a case for conservative totalitarianism.

By the way, this is the same George Will who wrote recently: “A prescription drug entitlement is not inherently unconservative, unless the welfare state itself is—and it isn't.”