The reason why the ideological bubble of mainstream liberalism is so resistant to being punctured is that it is part of a moral bubble: an unchallenged belief in the morality of welfare-state altruism. In the altruist worldview, supporting yourself and providing for your own needs has no moral significance, but providing for the needs of others makes you virtuous. And the best position of all is to be the middleman distributing those handouts from the haves to the have-nots. It doesn’t require you to sacrifice your own prosperity, but it still gives you the moral high ground of being the agent for the redistribution of wealth.

The welfare-state altruist thinks government is the answer to every problem because it follows this altruist model: a benevolent elite providing handouts to support the helpless little guy.

But Chait’s own column gives a clue to the profound moral failure of this approach. It encourages the individual to outsource the responsibility for supporting his own life, waiting for largess from distant bureaucrats who are not necessarily benevolent. And precisely because these middlemen live off of an unlimited stream of free money-tax money taken from our paychecks, or dollars summoned out of thin air by the Federal Reserve-they continue to prosper and advance regardless of whether their vast federal projects actually help anyone.