The left is making a big deal about the terrible conditions of life in American in 2006. People are fearful about being bankrupted by illness and losing their jobs to foreign trade. The income gap is growing, with the super-rich grabbing an ever-increasing share of the nation’s wealth. Today’s Wall Street Journal seems more like The Nation than itself, with two big, mournful pieces that call out for the federal government to save us from the horrors of the free market. Here’s the letter I sent in:
The pairing of David Wessel’s front page article (“Democrats Target Wealth Gap and Hope Not to Hit Economy”) and the editorial page piece by Roger Altman and Alan Blinder (“The Economic Front”) gives a huge boost to the efforts of Nanny State politicians to build their case for more interventions to make things more fair and secure. Wessel says that the recent election was a “cri de coeur” from the middle class for help and Altman and Blinder lament that the middle class is falling further behind the rich.
All of the governmental interventions they discuss, from raising the minimum wage to increasing taxes on “the rich” to further subsidizing college will accomplish nothing except to drag the United States in the direction of the moribund welfare states of Europe. Americans need — and should want — greater freedom to manage their own affairs, not more government meddling.
This is obviously a political ploy by clever partisans to make people feel that liberty is something to fear and that we need more federal cuddling. Nothing new here. H. L. Mencken saw exactly what’s going on when he wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
My own middle class cri de coeur is for a leader who will make the case for freedom.
George C. Leef
