Excellent stuff....excerpt from, last paragraph.
The Paternal State, Welfare State, and Free State
"When truths
of economic principles like those of Public Choice theory or Say's Law are never heard in political discourse and almost never heard in public at all,
things do not look good for the future of freedom. As the welfare state runs up against fiscal failure, the rebound can as well be back towards paternalism as towards liberalism.
The ongoing popularity of the war on drugs
and the virtual media black-out of principled criticism of it holds out little hope that liberal priniciples can be reestablished in that direction. Meanwhile, most citizens seem to have come to believe that a non-judgmental,
unconditional maternal care is what the government owes them. In a democracy, this means that politicians will continue to promise the Moon and shuffle the paperwork under the carpet. Unlike Enron, the fraud and
diseconomies of this can be concealed for decades, as long as the debt can be obscured or deferred. The Social Security system will cease to run a surplus and begin to draw on the Treasury some time beween 2012 and
2018, by current estimates. Politicians promising ever more benefits can hurry that along a bit. They do say that people get the kind of government they deserve. And the Founding Fathers did say that the
Republic would
only last as long as the virtue of the citizens. The greatest evil of the welfare state, indeed, is that it is designed to protect people from the consequences of vice. Now we have the worst of both worlds, and the most
noxious and evil of combinations, when many in government think it is their job to enforce virtue, paternally, but then actually have to promise, maternally, to protect everyone from their own imprudence and folly --
meaning of course, that the remaining prudent and wise must pay the cost. They don't like that, but their political voice is usually muted or distracted. If they knew what to demand, it would simply be that government is
neither mother nor father, while it is the duty of citizens to be adults."