Entitlements: Give Democrats as much ObamaCare rope as they want, then sit back and watch them hang themselves. This advice from some pundits is the kind of thing that will make ObamaCare permanent.

The late, great Bob Bartley, longtime editor of the Wall Street Journal, writing in 1992 in his definitive account of the Reagan prosperity, "The Seven Fat Years," issued a warning about government-controlled health care.

He called it "absolutely true that in the long term we will be unable to control government expenditure if the government keeps assuming new responsibilities."

And Bartley cautioned: "When medical insurance coverage is mandated, experience shows, there is enormous pressure for it to cover more and more services. ... If the government is going to assume or mandate universal health care, we will have to draw a line somewhere. ... If we cannot do this, medical care will grow into a limitless entitlement, defeating any attempt to hold the line on spending and taxes."

That is not, however, what we are hearing from some of today's self-styled apostles of Bartley. Some would have us stop worrying and wait until 2017.

Apparently subscribing to the maxim "the bigger they are, the harder they fall," they say if we just stand back, away from danger, we can watch America's entitlement state collapse under its own weight. Then gleefully pick up the pieces and build a free-market health system.

That's because, we are told, the U.S. populace will soon collectively lose its faith in big government, if we only allow it to get large and incompetent enough.

In support of this argument, oddly, we are presented with Bismarck, the creator of the welfare state that soon spread throughout Europe.

How's that again? Europe, including Britain under Margaret Thatcher, has never been able to wean itself off socialized medicine.

"The NHS is safe in our hands," Thatcher famously promised regarding Britain's nightmarishly incompetent National Health Service. And as British health analyst S.A. Mathieson wrote when Thatcher died, "while the privatizations she championed moved whole sectors of the economy from the public to the private sector, they hardly touched the health service," which even today "is still mostly owned and run by the state and performs the vast majority of health care work."

There is much to be learned from the fact that even the Iron Lady couldn't get rid of a government program as criminally dysfunctional as the NHS once it became entrenched in the fabric of national life — because once hooked, a heroin addict demands his heroin.

These governmental optimists tell us of how it was long ago recognized by various commissions that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are ultimately financially doomed.

But the point of that fact is: That didn't move the political needle against those entitlements. We still haven't replaced them with free-market solutions.

Like Jack Kemp in the late 1970s, Ted Cruz and his allies are mocked as devotees of the impossible. Bartley knew Kemp was a visionary; Cruz and his allies should be similarly supported today.

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