In a book review this month, Brink Lindsey, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute — a man who knows what he is up against — reported some extraordinary statistics. The majority of Americans are wary of global trade, don’t trust free markets and also think that “the benefits from . . . Social Security or Medicare are worth the costs of those programs.” And when the sample is restricted to people who support the Tea Party movement? The share is still 62 percent.
Yet it is Social Security, Medicare and the ever-expanding list of earmarks — federal grants — that are going to sink the American budget in the next few decades, not President Obama’s health-care reform (though that won’t help). Yet in Washington, these expenditures are known as “third rails”: If you touch them, you’re dead. President George W. Bush talked a little about making individuals more responsible for their retirement, and then he gave up. The “privatization” of Social Security, as it was sneeringly described, was too unpopular, particularly among his supporters.
Look around the world, and we don’t look as exceptional as we think. Chileans are willing to save for their own retirement. Most Europeans are reconciled to the idea that not everybody, at any age and in any condition, is entitled to the most expensive medical technology. A secretary of state or defense traveling with dozens of cars and armed security guards would seem absurd in many countries, as would the notion that the government provides a tax break if you buy a house or that schools should close if there is ice on the roads. Yet we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we also rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created — democratically, constitutionally, openly — to deliver it.
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