Outlook Impoved, say Medicare Trustees

The annual Medicare Trustees Report came out yesterday, and the official line is good news.  You can see that from Googling the news reports.

Not surprisingly, administration spokesmen have claimed that the Affordable Care Act is partially responsible for this. Maybe.  After all, the ACA is supposed to raid Medicare of something like $700 billion over ten years to pay for the ACA.  Or maybe the answer is Medicare Advantage, which encourages large deductibles and limits the front-end "free stuff" aspects of conventional Medicare.

What has happened is that Medicare costs have moderated in recent years, although they are expected to start to climb significantly by 2020.  But the result is that, according to my analysis at usgovernmentspending.com, Medicare costs will reach 4 percent of GDP by 2023 -- instead of in 2020 as forecast in last year's report.  Long term, at the end of the century, Medicare is forecast to approach 7 percent of GDP.

Think of it.  By the end of the century the American people will be forking out 7 percent of every dollar just for the government share of senior healthcare, and that doesn't include Medicaid expenditures for the low-income elderly.

Something, as they say, will have to give.  And way before the end of the century.

In a way, it's nice that the government takes care of our retirement income and health care.  It relieves us seniors of the big worries of our declining years.  Feel a pain, head for the doctor.  But I worry about the young 'uns.  Is is really fair or just to saddle them with such enormous burdens?

If you raise the question with a liberal they will ask you whether you want grandma starving in the street.  Good point, liberal.

But, as the Brits are finding out, if you tighten up on welfare eligibility, more of the poor go out and get a job.  In other words, marginal economics works, even with welfare.  If you change the rules a bit, people will change their behavior a bit.  Maybe we could try that with Medicare, especially as old people are the richest kind in America.  What a concept: make seniors more individually responsible for their health care.

John Hawkins, in a typical "5 Obvious Principles of Human Nature That Baffle Liberals," points out the central principle of responsible individualism.

[I]t’s bad for people to have someone else making the decisions about their kids’ education, their retirement, and their health care[.]

That's because the person that has other people make the big decisions about their life is, de facto if not de jure, a slave.

Hawkins also mentions a corollary of this truth: "it’s even worse that the government officials that take those decisions away from people are usually given a free pass when they screw-up."

Yeah.  Why is that?  Oh all right, we know why.  The whole point of government power (as opposed to market power) is that you don't get called on your mistakes.  If you can get called on your mistakes then you don't have power, you just have responsibility.

The whole point of responsible individualism is to reduce the amount of power and domination in the world and increase the amount of responsible individual acts in the world.

So here's a question.  Under what conditions would seniors like me demand of the government: take it away?  Take Medicare away and let me get my own health care in my old age. Hey, I'll even kick in a little for the aged poor.

Don't hold your breath.

The Seeds of Destruction

For conservatives there is much in Obama's America that doesn't make sense.  Why is Obama so terminally divisive? Why would gays, on the cusp of winning their "marriage equality" want to rub out a techie like Brendan Eich?  Why would feminists, after a half century of feminist progress, now be subjecting college boys to the witch hunt of the "rape culture?"  Don't these people understand that they've won?

Jim Goad describes what is going on here.

Howard Bloom’s book The Lucifer Principle goes into great detail describing how social movements that initially claim to merely seek “equality” morph into insatiably power-hungry predatory super-organisms once their alleged oppressors are willing to grant them equal treatment. While those making the concessions may think they’re doing so in the name of “fairness,” groups who are on the ascent tend to smell blood instead. Once even a semblance of “equality” is achieved, the mask falls off and it becomes a naked drive for power. They never seem sated by equality and keep moving the goalposts, ultimately becoming every bit as oppressive and intolerant as their former masters.

The point is that any political movement is about politics.  It starts, no doubt, with a sharp experience of injustice.  That is not hard to do because all government dispense injustice, because they write their laws based on their ruling-class interpretation of justice. Others find their so-called justice the acme of injustice.

Very well. But politics is politics, and involves mobilizing people into a political army that is trained and inspired to fight, whatever the cost, for truth and justice.

What happens to the political army once it has achieved its goal?  Nothing.  So it looks for new fields to conquer, and that is the moment that the political movement transforms itself from a movement for justice into a cruel agent of injustice.  We've seen that happen to the civil-rights movement, to the environmental movement, to the feminist movement, and now the gay movement.

But why is Barack Obama so insistent on dividing America?

I've been reading a piece by Harry Stein on his father, Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof.  Joe was a lefty-liberal all his life, and couldn't understand his son's journey to the right.

My father simply couldn’t fathom how any thinking person, let alone someone who’d imbibed politics at his knee, could have ended up a . . . well, he never actually used the word, at least not directly. 

The word, of course, is Fascist.

The point is that Barack Obama has lived his entire life in a left-liberal bubble.  He is part of a political movement that is dedicated to "fundamentally transforming" America.  The point about such a political movement is that, by its nature, it doesn't know when to stop.

Back in the 2000s I was worried by books like The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira.  They projected that a new majority of blacks, Latinos, women, the educated, and the young would form a new majority that would rule for decades.

But the problem is that Obama has rained hardship on this new majority. Blacks have lost the homes that the real-estate bubble got them into, and are devastated that the the new dawn promised by the election of a black president has turned into a mirage.  Hispanics want jobs and they don't see them. The educated are confused, and the young are totally screwed.  College educated youth is buried in student debt, and the rest of the youth are buried in the slow recovery.

The most telling thing is that inequality has got worse on Obama's watch.

Yeah, well, say conservatives and libertarians.  What do you expect when you boost welfare and food stamps, and you implement Keynesian cheap money?

The point is that Obama and his acolytes in the liberal bubble don't get it.  They think that cheap money "stimulates" the economy.  They think that their programs to help the poor alleviate inequality.  But somehow it's all gone wrong.  That's why they are looking for scapegoats and reckon that some dastardly Republican plot masterminded by the Koch Brothers has destroyed the president's agenda. They are like Harry Stein's father. They can't wrap their brains around the notion that they could be wrong, and that it is the president's policies that have caused the present malaise.

That brings us to the good news.  The polls say that the American people are coming to the notion that we need different policies to attack America's problems.  There's wisdom in that poll question and in the response of the voters.  Americans don't know the first thing about economics and how to promote prosperity.  In fact they believe a bunch of contradictory things about the economy.  Think of their ideas as a muddy precipitate of all the sound bites that are flung at them every day.

There's one thing that the voters can decide for us.  When they sense that things are on the wrong track, they can vote for a change.  That's what happened in 1980 when voters repudiated the McGovernite Sixties generation.  It took nearly a generation after the debacle of the Sixties New Left before Americans could vote for an unapologetic leftist, and even then the media hid Obama's leftism from the voters.

But now the voters sense that things aren't working.  Probably they'll surprise us in November with a wave election that unseats a couple of Democratic senators that nobody thought were in trouble.  And then it will be on to 2016 when Republicans will have at least three bright and energetic young candidates -- Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Ryan: your list is as good as mine -- that will be telling the American people that it is time for a change.

Oh yeah.  The Democrats will be flogging their base with wars on women and gays and finding racism in every living room, board room, locker room, and classroom.  But there comes a moment in flogging a cart horse when the light goes out of its eyes.  It just doesn't have the strength or the will to shove its weight against the harness.  It just stands there, under a rain of blows, and does nothing.

Because politics is about power, government is about force, and human society is about something better than power games and brute force.

Get a Clue on Reality of Politics and Journalism, Ron Fournier

For years I've been wondering how the Obama administration does it.  I mean how it has managed near zero pushback from the media?

I know that the media are all liberals and liberals believe that the Democrats' hearts are in the right place.  But still, somewhere, somehow there must have been a liberal joournalist whose desire to make a name for himself should have won out against tribal loyalty.  After all, you don't make a career in journalism by going along to get along.  Not any more, not while dead-tree journalism is flushing down the toilet.

There must me more to the Obama message discipline than tribal loyalty, and the "more" has been slowly dribbling out in the lame-duck years of the Obama presidency.  We've seen that Obama officials go nuclear against journalists that displease them, pushing back with appalling invective in a brazen attempt to intimidate.  And we've seen that the Obamis appeal over the heads of the journalists to the Democratic-contributor suits at the media outlets to keep the junior journos in line.

Now we see, from a frustrated Ron Fournier, that there's another method to the Obama media blitzkrieg: the media minder.  Quoting a Washington Post staffer, he writes:

"Almost every officially sanctioned exchange between reporters and the proverbial 'senior administration officials' is conducted in the presence of a press staffer, even when the interview is 'on background,' meaning the source will not be identified by name."

The purpose of the "press staffer" is not just to intimidate the reporter but also the administration official.

"If you have a minder there, it sits in [a source's] brain that they're supposed to stay on message," said Peter Baker, who covers the White House for the New York Times. "They're less likely to share something other than the talking points."

Ron Fournier's solution to this problem is to "flip the script," to refuse to play by the rules, to make the administration fear the reporter rather than the other way around.

But this is rubbish, at least for reporters in a Democratic administration.  And it violates what I call the "Jack Patera Rule." Or you can call it the "blood in the water" rule.

The story is simple.  Years ago, Jack Patera was the first head coach of the expansion Seattle Seahawks.  Every week the local sports journalists would interview him on various pre- and post-game shows, respectfully asking the usual nuts-and-bolts questions about the game.  But then the day came when Jack Patera was fired as head coach, and we found out that the journalists had never liked him. Then all the dirt came out.  No kidding!  You guys thought Jack was a loser all along?  Why didn't you tell us, you rough, tough, muckracking journos?

Of course the sports journalists didn't tell us.  Because day-to-day their jobs depended on the nuts-and-bolts PR of interviews and canned questions about the team and the game.  If they had started asking difficult questions, then they would have lost their jobs.

Because the whole point of sports journalism is to do PR for the home sports teams.

Until there is blood in the water, and the coach loses his job.  Then it's shark feeding time and the journos can circle in for the kill.

That's why Ron Fournier needs to get a clue on the journalists that cover the Obama administration.  If any journalist "flipped the script" on the Obamis it would be his last interview.  Game over. Career over.  There are lots more journalists where that one came from, hungry journalists willing to play doormat for the next interview.

Until there is blood in the water, and everyone agrees that President Obama is the worst president ever and the officials of the Obama administration are the most useless and incompetent and corrupt ever.  Then you'll see courage returning to the press corps. Then you'll see the sharks going in for the kill.

The only guys that could have "flipped the script" were the Obamis.  They could have said: Look, everyone wants to be able to control the message, but you can go too far.  Isn't the whole point of the media is to shine a light upon the government, and give it some feedback?  That way, maybe, we can avoid making a few real boner mistakes.

But that was never the way that the Obamis approached things.  They wanted to push as many left-liberal policies past the point of no-return as they could, never mind how it was done.  We can assume that they believed in the ratchet effect.  Once you start a government program it is almost impossible to stop it.

And, of course, there is the little matter of power.  Men like power, and will seize it if they can.  What's the point of political power if you don't use it?  The place to learn the game of power when you are merely a bush-league politician is in bullying young bush-league journalists around, because they need you more than you need them.  By the time you have graduated to big-league politics you are practiced enough to bully big-league journalists around!

Which way is best for an administration?  Is it best to use the utmost ferocity in your messaging and make the journos fear you?  Or is it best to ease up a bit and let them criticize you?

Stay tuned for the final two years of the Obama administration to find out.

Fighting the Left-wing Culture

Here's a touching story from Taki on-line magazine.  It's about Roy Griffis, who's been writing for years, but could never break through the liberal gatekeepers in the entertainment and publishing industries.

But now, as Amy Sterzinger writes, Griffis is finally getting published, because of the growth of indie publishing efforts like Liberty Island.

You can see why he's had a problem.

Griffis began writing as a teenager. By his 30s he’d given up on selling stories to magazines, with their labyrinthine rules about which viewpoints were correct for sympathetic characters to hold. He turned to screenplays. But screenplays introduced him to even more of what he calls the “good-think rules” for media. When working on a history piece set during the Korean War, Griffis was using North Korean characters as antagonists in the drama, and the producer told him: “Let me check and see if they’re okay.”

Hello! Can anyone spell C-E-N-S-O-R-S-H-I-P?

Anyway, Griffis has started writing novels, and has written two series already.  So I though I'd better get started on his "By the Hands of Men" series. Imagine a book uncensored by the lefties at the Ministry of Lefty Publishing.

Of course, in all ages the gatekeepers are trying to control what is thought and said -- particularly the best that is thought and said.  That's how you do social control.  Right now I'm reading a book on the Bronte sisters, The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller, and back then they said that Jane Eyre was full of "coarseness." They meant that it had too much sex and violence for nice young ladies.  I expect they were right.

It used to be the church that did all this social control, and now it's liberals.  Right this week, Tracy von Slyke has been writing in the British Guardian about the intolerable racism of the BBC Thomas the Tank Engine TV series.  You see, the steam engines are the good guys and all exude white smoke and the dirty diesels spout black smoke.  And as for the Fat Controller, that icon of the white patriarchy!

Never mind that "everybody" in England in the 1950s hated the diesels, including lefties that hadn't yet realized that coal was the root of all evil.  (By the way, steam maxes out at about 6% efficiency, and diesel at about 40%)

The problem is everywhere.  I get to watch children's cartoon features when I'm visiting my grandchildren and the lefty cultural assumptions in the movies frankly terrify me.  But what's a grandfather to do?  Well, he can start patronizing the adversary culture.  Over at Vox Popoli, Vox Day is aggressively trying to lead the Science Fiction/Fantasy world away from lefty cultural control, and getting the lefty Torquemada treatment for his pains. And he is actively involved in a center-right SFF publishing venture, Castalia House.  Don't ask me why it's based in Finland.

My guess is that the current lefty cultural offensive is going to run out of steam in the next couple of years, as Americans resist its totalitarian mind control with a "backlash."

But a tactical reverse isn't enough.  To beat the lefty culture we need the counterforce of a righty culture with culture warriors ready to do battle and die for the cause.

Maybe, just maybe, the retreat of the big five publishers at the hands of Amazon and the possibility of non-Hollywood movies getting made will make a difference.

But don't hold your breath.  I'm still under the influence of Eric Hoffer and The Ordeal of Change.  He points out that the intellectuals are a class that got started with the invention of writing, and they are nothing but trouble. Half the time they are employed by the state and happily order the people around at the command of the rulers.  But when the state collapses, as it does from time to time, then the intellectuals are out of a job and get angry and take up their pens against the state as revolutionary leaders of the people.

Go figure.

Obamas' Problem, Chris Cilizza, Is That Liberalism is Unjust

We conservatives have been waiting for this: the moment when liberal pundits would view the failed Obama presidency and sigh that the job was just too big for one man.  Déjà vu Jimmy Carter all over again.

So here comes liberal worthy Chris Cillizza telling us that "It's virtually impossible to be a successful modern president." No!

For you young 'uns, a bit of history.  Back in the 1970s when the liberals ruined the economy with Keynesianism and big government and Jimmy Carter had his head handed to him by the Soviets, the best and the brightest all opined that, gosh, the job was just too big for one man.  Maybe we needed a committee of presidents instead of one man.

Earth to liberals:  The problem isn't the man. The problem is the system, the whole unjust system of administrative bureaucracy by the best and brightest that you call "liberal" and "progressive."

Oh and don't forget to add in the secular liberal Puritanism that stigmatizes and shames and shuns anyone that doesn't salute when the identity-politics parade goes by.  What I want to know is who will write The Pink Letter for our age in which a conservative young woman gets shamed and shunned and forced to wear a pink "B" because she didn't want to make a wedding cake for a pair of sue-happy gays with contacts at the local Human Rights Commission?

But of course liberalism is not merely unjust.  It studiously ignores, as any pony-tailed lefty fundamentalist would do, a century of settled social science.

Correction.  It would be settled science if more than 2 1/2 liberals had actually read it and if more than a couple of liberal professors had actually got their students to study it.

Let's review the settled science.

Settled Science Part One.  It was nearly a century ago that the Austrian Jew Ludwig von Mises wrote that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices.  For about 20 years lefty writers tried to refute Mises.  Then they gave up and pushed him down the memory hole.

Settled Science Part Two.  Mises' student, F.A. Hayek extended his teacher's argument.  He said that administrative government couldn't work, for two reasons.  Reason one was that the administrative bureaucrat could never know enough to run a large program when compared against millions of consumers and producers interacting via the price system.  Reason two was that you could never write a law that covered all the contingencies of a large government program, so bureaucrats would have to write regulations on the fly.  But wait a minute!  I thought that writing laws was the job of Congress, not the president and his assignees.  Hello Injustice.  Hello Obamacare!

Settled Science Part Three. All legislating involves the springtime of the special interests and the buying of votes to force the legislation down the throats of the minority.  This settled science is called "public choice" theory.  The go-to guys are James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent.  Interestingly, if you are interested in justice, the only voting system that does not involve raping and pillaging the minority is the voting system of unanimous consent.  That way the majority has to buy the votes of the entire minority; in other words the majority will have to compensate the minority for its costs.  Notice the gravamen of this settled science.  All legislation is unjust except unanimous consent, because all majority voting amounts to two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for breakfast.

The answer to the injustice of liberal politics is simple, Chris Cillizza.  Read, learn, and inwardly digest the settled science and stop this culture of denial.  Cut government down to size, so that it is within the span of control of a single man.

Actually there is a bigger question here, and it issues from my apothegm that "government is force."

If government is force then everything that government does has the character of a war: a war on terror or a war on big banks. (Har Har.  I notice that progressive darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is perfectly happy with the crony capitalist Ex-Im Bank).

Then there are the wars on drugs, on poverty, on bigotry, on ignorance.  They go on forever.

And that's the problem.  You can see it from the failed presidency of George W. Bush.  He realized that he could only fight one war, the war in Iraq.  So he let everything else slide, including the housing bubble that was the consequence of a war for affordable housing and a war against redlining.

Here's my point.  The president is really nothing more than the commander-in-chief.  He is there in case the United States needs to go to war.  If the United States is engaged in a bunch of stupid local liberal wars like the war on poverty and the war on bigotry then the president isn't going to have enough bandwidth to do his job when a real war comes along.  He's going to be distracted by all the liberal activists showing up to insist that he nullify the immigration laws, etc.

So, Chris Cillizza and all you big-government believers: here's the bottom line.  If you want the president to be successful, then stop the expansion of government.  Don't have the government in charge of social services and turn everything social into a war against something.  Put the people in charge of helping the poor and educating the children.  Because justice.  Don't have the government regulating business: it won't work.  Public choice theory says that the regulators will end up being "captured" by the businesses they regulate.  Don't regulate business.  Because justice.

There's really a simple reason why we should cut the size of government.  We humans are social animals that thrive by communication and cooperation.  We are not Newtonian mechanical monsters that move by force.  Big business and big government are systems, and systems are there to dominate.  Even German neo-Marxists like Jürgen Habermas can figure that out.

It's Not the Economy, Stupid!

A big hinge-point in my adult life from 1968 to now is the Turn of 1998.  That's when nice kindly women voters decided that since the federal budget was in surplus it was time for government to "do" stuff again.

No! No! No!  That's what I wanted to bellow to the soccer moms back then.  Everything government does is a mess; everything it does is a waste, from the Pentagon down to midnight basketball.  If you girls want a nice kindly society where people help each other, then start helping each other.  You ain't gonna get it from bigger government.

I return to 1998 today because of Michael Barone's piece about Obama's poll troubles.  It's not about the lackluster economy, writes Barone; the economy is growing, so things can't be too bad on the economic front.

No, Obama's problem is that the world on his watch is becoming noticeably disorderly.  And the distaff side notices that keenly.  Mr. President, Is It Safe? That's what women always ask.

Americans, unlike voters in many other countries, demand the maintenance of order in the world as well in their own nation. From the early days of the republic, there has been an unspoken awareness that what happens in the world affects their own lives.

The fact is that, under Obama, it is not safe.  The border is not safe, Chicago is not safe, the Middle East is not safe.  If we get down to the economy, well, the economy is not safe either.  And don't get me started on the federal budget.

In other words, the world is in a situation where US women have started to worry again about the safety of their loved ones.

Let's rehearse the model of the Democrats as the Mommy Party and the Republicans as the Daddy Party.  Women are always ready to forgive their loved ones for their folly, and slip Junior a $20 bill while Daddy isn't watching, while Daddy always wants the kids to learn the hard way.  But when things get hot and heavy then women rely on men to do the heavy lifting -- i.e. fighting -- to get the world back in order again.

Back in the 1970s the world was coming unstuck and so women found themselves supporting the rough tough Ronald Reagan, even though all the good and the great told them he was an extremist. Women knew it was Daddy Time. But 20 years later all seemed right with the world so women were ready to start slipping $20 bills to delinquent Junior again.

Today, it's obvious that we have squandered the legacy of Ronald Reagan, so the voters are coming to see that it's time to square up and restore order.

But it's such a shame that we can't learn from the past.  It's not that hard.  Government is only good for fighting wars.  Come peace time we should roll government up and deliver social services to our less fortunate brethren ourselves. To delegate the job to lifer bureaucrats and power-hungry activists and politicians is utter folly.  But hey, who can say No to free stuff?

At least we can thank President Obama and the Obamis for showing us how clueless and mindless and useless government can be. From the TSA to the VA and every IRS in between.

Millennials: Who's the Dominator, Business or Government?

We've been looking at business and government, and noting their huge power to dominate in the modern age.  But which is worst?  If you ask the politician or the activist they would say it's no contest.  The only thing saving the worker from a fate worse than death is the social legislation and regulation that the modern state has enacted over the last century to curb the power of business and corporations.

It was, of course, Karl Marx that set the campaign against business into overdrive.  Actually, his critique was nuanced.  He marveled at the wonders of technology and the world-wide reach of the trading system; he just felt that it would all end in tears because the efficiency of the system would squeeze out the worker, with corporations lowering wages down to subsistence level as they competed for business with each other.

In a way, Marx was right.  Older established corporations wither away and die all the time, and their workers suffer.  That's what the Joe Soptic steelworker story was all about in 2012.  But the story of the last century and a half is that while some workers suffer when their industries decline and fail, most workers benefit as technology and markets throw up more products at lower prices.  In the process farmers have become miners and steelworkers and manufacturing workers, and manufacturing workers have become service workers.  To put it crudely, whereas workers used to wield a shovel to move the earth, and then a machine, most workers today use machines (computers) to interact with other people.

It got to the point, in 1920, when the thinking Marxists of the Frankfurt School started moving towards the idea that both modern business and modern government were dominatory, exploitative entities.  What was needed was something to balance the power of system.  And Jurgen Habermas suggested that the answer was the free and intersubjective communication between humans as equal humans rather than the mechanical forces of business or government systems.  You mean they use machines to interact with other people?

But I want to push the argument a little further.  I want to suggest that, even in the interest of pure power, there is a limit to how far you can use business or government to dominate people.  Let's take business first.

The pure industrial system of human domination was not the satanic mill of the 19th century but the slave plantation of the 18th century.  People wrote books about how to organize a slave plantation on the "gang system" -- the prototype of the assembly line -- and how to apply a steady driving "force" to make the whole thing work.  Since the plantation owners on the West Indian sugar islands ran the government, they could apply whatever "steady driving force" they felt was needed.  And it was needed because post-pubertal males would not submit freely to the gang system.  But the plantation owners found that they got better results from their slaves by freeing them up to be creative and resourceful.

A century later the factory bosses found that it was almost impossible to get post-pubertal males to submit to the factory system.  The solution was compulsory education to get little kiddies used to submission for K through 12th grade.  Then they could be good productive employees in big organizations and do what they were told.

Still, businesses found that dutiful obedient employees weren't enough.  They needed creative resourceful employees that could solve problems and come up with new ideas.  So even as government was writing laws to regulate the relations between employer and worker the businessmen found that the best employees were free, creative employees.  Or they might leave.  Today, even at mega-corporation Walmart employees can go in the back room and take online courses to raise their hourly pay.  And if they see a product flying off the shelves at their store they have the authority to order more.

It's telling that when big government really got going in the 20th century it applied a degree of force in Soviet Russia and Maoist China that made the brutality of the slave-drivers look like a Sunday picnic.

But if you don't apply discipline, how do you get the workers to work?  In The Ordeal of Change longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer gives the answer.  It is individualism.  Why?  Because in the individualist society "the individual in the mass who turns to work as a means of proving his worth and usefulness."  In a collective society, you have worth just because you belong.  We are not talking about individual geniuses here.

All we can claim for the individual in [individualist] society is that he is more or less on his own; that he chooses his course through life, proves himself by his own efforts, and has to shoulder the responsibility of what he makes of his life.

In fact, individual freedom delivers the individual into the hands of a ruthless taskmaster: himself.

Do you see the paradox here?  In our society the left makes a big deal that we are all in this together and that you didn't build your business on your own.  But unless society promotes individualism the government or the employer will have to drive everyone at work.  It is only an individualist society where people motivate themselves to work, and thus do not need supervision and the encouragement of the overseer's lash.

In business, everyone is ceaselessly striving to improve their product or their service, to prove their worth and usefulness.  Even in my lifetime, we have seen the fall of the steel companies, the fall of the auto companies, the rise and fall of mainframe and minicomputers, the rise and fall of Sears and K-Mart.  Now we are seeing the old-line publishers in the coils of upstart Amazon.  Business reinvents itself every day; that's the only way it can keep offering jobs to American workers.

But look at government.  We are still in thrall to the bigger-is-better mentality as we try to make health care into a one-size-fits-all mega-program.  Suppose Obamacare is the best thing since sliced bread. How do we adjust it and reform it ten years, twenty years from now?  Notice how eager everyone is to reform Social Security and Medicare?  It is almost impossible to fix anything in government; that's because government is all about free stuff, and nobody will agree to give up their loot.  Don't cut my Medicare, says grandma.  Don't raise my payroll taxes, says the worker.  So nothing happens until the system breaks down.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, wrote Milton Friedman half a century ago.  If you want to lift the burden of responsibility from people and provide them with a safety net, then you must increase the level of force to make them work.  But if you leave people "on their own" then they will work and strive to provide products and services for other people.  If you leave business "on its own" then it will ceaselessly create a froth of new and improved products without anyone telling business what to do.  But if you decide to micromanage business and make it more socially conscious then you will have to ramp up the coercion and you will throttle the economy with rules and you will find that the poorest will suffer most.

These days the Millennial generation is having a tough time getting their adult lives off the ground.  There aren't many jobs and many Millennials are groaning under the weight of student debt.  The question is whether the answer is more government, to target the Millennials with special government programs and subsidies.  Or is the solution less government, to let Millennials create opportunities for themselves with a smaller government taking a smaller cut of the nation's product.

The answer, I suggest, is in the words of Aneurin Bevan, the British politician who got the National Health System started in the 1940s.  In order to get his bill passed he "stuffed their mouths with gold," in other words, he gave away the store to the medical profession.  Is that really the best we can do?  To help the poor we must enrich the special interests?  That's the way that Obamacare was passed, with handouts to insurance companies and drug companies.  There has to be a better way, and it probably means smaller government and fewer handouts to the powerful.