Before election officials started counting ballots last night, Kevin Williamson of National Review Online reminded readers that they shouldn’t look to the ballot to solve their problems.

A great deal of what happens in your life is going to be determined by factors beyond your immediate control. You have certain natural gifts and talents, and those are not going to change very much no matter what you do. You can develop them, but there are real limits on that development. It isn’t true that anyone can become a concert pianist or a chess grandmaster or a Fortune 500 CEO if only he wants it enough and is willing to put in the work. You do have to want it, and you do have to put in the work, but those are necessary, not sufficient, conditions. If you were going to dance with the Bolshoi or play in the NFL, you’d probably know it by now. …

… Free markets — which is to say, the economic networks that emerge when people are left free to pursue their own ends and interests — are good at many things, and one of the things they are terribly good at is sorting. Companies know who their most productive people are and which of the firms they work with provide the best results; and, though it is more art than science, they are pretty good at figuring out what characteristics those valuable workers and partner firms have. As human cooperation grows more and more seamless — this is what is meant by “globalization” — markets become larger, more fully integrated, and more efficient. Your value to an employer is always relative to the value of the next-best option (just as your employer’s value to you is always relative to your next-best option), but 50 years ago your employer’s choice of next-best options was limited to the available workers in your area and those who might be recruited to relocate there for work, whereas today there are next-best options everywhere from Ireland to India, depending on your job.

To the extent that you have skills and abilities that are neither uncommon nor bound to a particular place or institution, you are now in competition with workers from around the world in a way that your father and grandfather probably weren’t. That probably is not going to change, and the government could not do much to change it even if it wanted to, which it really doesn’t and shouldn’t.

Barack Obama has often derided such observations as a philosophy of “You’re on your own.” Some conservatives and libertarians even embrace “You’re on your own” as a kind of moral maxim. I myself recently was criticized as personifying an “unfeeling” conservatism; if by “unfeeling” we mean “unsentimental,” then I do hope so. But how one feels about these realities is immaterial. This is the way things are. It is not the case that you are on your own — we have families, and communities, and social-welfare programs that ensure you aren’t — but that you are your own, an autonomous individual with responsibility for, and to, himself.