Over at Naked Capitalism, Lambert Strether notes what should be obvious but is obfusicated by calls for ‘evidence-based debate’ in what passes for our political discourse:

To put this another way, since the mid-70s, when Canada adopted its single payer system, we’ve conducted the largest controlled experiment in the history of the world. We’ve had two political systems spanning the same continent, both nations of immigrants and once part of the British empire, both mainly English-speaking but multicultural, both with Federal systems, and both with a free market system backed by social insurance. And the results of the experiment? The “evidence”? Canadian-style single payer wins hands-down.

On virtually every domestic policy issue, we continue to reinvent a square wheel when we could just copy a functioning round one.

There are a lot of useful idiots and they are hurting us. One wonders just how much ruin there is in a nation.