National Affairs founding editor Yuval Levin joined Morning Joe Wednesday to discuss politics and healthcare, saying Obamacare has been a "radical approach to healthcare":
"It's not as radical as it could have been, but when it comes to solving the basic problem of healthcare I think it speaks to a way of thinking that definitely identifies more with the radical left, which is again to say 'expertise can solve this. Centralized expertise is the path to efficiency."
Levin, appeared on the show to discuss his book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, and described how the two 18th century thinkers formed the basis of the conservative and liberal ways of thinking.
"Payne thought politics to a certain extent should be applied to technical knowledge, and that one of the purposes of government was to allow for applied expertise to address social problems," Levin said. "Burke thought social knowledge could only exist in social form and apply it through institutions that apply broad social knowledge like markets, even the family, religious institutions, and our governing institutions," Levin said.
Levin noted that the debate over healthcare has been an area where both sides have remained largely consistent with Burke and Paine’s ideas:
"On the one side you have the left saying, 'What we need to solve our problems is to apply expertise, to apply knowledge for this to be efficient,' and what you have on the right is people saying, 'We need a system that takes dispersed knowledge, social knowledge at the ground level to solve the problems we have."
Full interview available below: