Two liberalisms

There are, broadly speaking, two types of liberal. There are those liberals who support liberal ideals of civil rights, legal equality, social welfare provisions, and diplomatic solutions to international issues. Then there are liberals who identify very heavily with the liberal state regardless of the state's role in either protecting or weakening civil protections, whether or not citizens are equal, who are happy to bundle social welfare with extensive policing and surveillance to make sure that the poor are 'deserving', and who are happy to hold "humanitarian interventions" or to occupy a foreign country indefinitely under some sort of "you break it, you bought it" ideology. (That the state may then purposefully knock into some other country in order to break and then buy it under this regime is left unexamined.)

We'll now get to see which pundits and popular figures are the former type and which are the latter type now that U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson struck down the "individual mandate" requiring most Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014. The Justice Department is expected to challenge the judge's findings in a federal appeals court.

Hint as to where the goats will be separated from the sheep: solving the health insurance problem by legally compelling most people to buy insurance was a very silly idea when Mitt Romney instituted it in Massachusetts. Now that the same notion has a liberal gloss to it...