First, some encouraging words about our country and us from a talk columnist George Will delivered recently at the Cato Institute:
We are not Europeans. We are not, in Orwell’s phrase, a “state-broken people.” We do not have a feudal background of subservience to the state. No, that is the project of the current administration – it can be boiled down to learned feudalism. It is a dependency agenda that I have been talking about ad nauseam.
And now, from the same talk, some discouraging words about our current leaders’ plans to change this:
Two recent examples. First, when the government took over student loans, making it the case that the two most important financial transactions of the average family – a housing mortgage and a loan for college – will now be transactions with the government, they included a provision that said there will be special forgiveness of student loans for those who go to work for the government or for nonprofits. Second, one third of the recent stimulus was devoted to preserving unionized public employees’ jobs in states and local municipalities. And so it goes. The agenda is constant.
A troubling question keeps recurring to me: When everybody works for the government, who’s going to pay for government?