Before I could mildly hedge and retract, I was shown why I shouldn't.

I had my little rant this morning:

That is the nature of government. It is a solution to collective action problems. The questions are who the "we" is, what "our" problems are, and what acceptable means to solve the problems are. Generally the third question is argued as a rear-guard action when the first two arguments have been lost.

I was going to, on reflection, back off on the last point.  You can have a big boat view of who our society is, agree on the problem and its seriousness, and still have disagreements on the best means to solve that problem.  However, often enough it is true that the means arguments are chosen as means to not solve problems.  Abdication to market forces, for example, is often a decidedly inadequate means to solve a problem, offered in hope that people forget that there is a problem.  No dice.  We have Medicare because market forces were not working for seniors in the 60's; the medical marketplace has not become any friendlier.

Krugman's razor slices to the bone again:

Here’s an analogy: think of Medicare as a footbridge that is deteriorating and will eventually become unsafe. You could propose structural repairs to fix its faults; Ryan doesn’t do that. Instead, he proposes knocking the bridge down and replacing it with trampolines, in the hope that pedestrians can bounce across the stream. And the Post declares that he deserves credit for pointing out that the bridge is falling down, and proposing a solution. Um, we knew that the bridge was in bad shape — and his solution is a fraud.

So, no, I'm not retracting.  Nuancing a little, but that's it.