If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.

The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money.

The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?