When the whole “caring industry” took off 15 or 20 years ago, it gave me an uneasy feeling. Not that I didn’t care about things, people, animals, the environment. But suddenly I didn’t care enough for the people who had bumper stickers that actually said “I CARE,” as if everyone else on the road didn’t. The state of North Carolina will even sell you a license plate that says as much.

Then CBS got into the act with its “CBS Cares” campaign, which always looks like “CB Scares” to me. So what’s so bad about all this care pushing? Here’s Richard Epstein’s view of modern socialism, which has had to hide its anti-freedom, anti-property motives behind some subterfuge:

“At a personal level, it speaks to the alienation of the individual, stressing the need for caring and sharing and the politics of meaning. At a regulatory level, it seeks to identify specific sectors in which there is a market failure and then to subject them to various forms of government regulation.”

If that sentiment sounds familiar, it’s pretty much the worldview of Barack Obama, most recently stated in his “cling to guns and religion” comments made at a meeting last week with San Francisco lefties.

Just read your daily paper if you want a sickening dose of the caring industry. Daily you will find stories on “walks” for this or that, with “caring” people engaged in meaningless gestures designed to make you feel morally inferior, and groups that go to great lengths to help people who should be helping themselves, thus perpetuating the problems they are trying to solve by enabling people and instilling a sense that people should wait for other people to solve their problems.

That the problems (poverty, illegitimacy, gangs, crime, etc.) actually have gotten worse since everyone began “caring” is all the better for socialists. When things get really bad due to their meddling, the revolution will follow. At least that’s their hope.

UPDATE: In a similar vein, George Will discusses the anti-democratic nature of liberalism in his column today.

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.