LONDON -- Remember Pushme-Pullyu? That was the llama with a head at both ends, from the "Dr. Dolittle" stories by the British-born Hugh Lofting. The creature could get along just fine in the 1967 and 1998 movies starring Rex Harrison and Eddie Murphy, but in the real world, of course, such an absurd critter has never existed -- unless one counts the forward-backward creature known as socialism, in which things are free but are often not available. Alas, the pushme-pullyu paradox of socialism is not confined to faraway areas. Practical-minded Americans, for example, might consider themselves to be immune to...