This is not the way the world is supposed to work-even if you are hopelessly infatuated with Keynesianism. Cheerleaders for Keynesianism, of course, take it as a tenet of their faith that the government should be spending aggressively during economic downturns. (To their way of thinking, the social welfare state should be one of the main vehicles for such expenditures: not only to provide a safety net, but to stimulate upswing by making up for insufficient macroeconomic demand.)

Yet to the finely calibrated Keynesian mind, government spending is supposed to be counter-cyclical: meaning that as things get better, the hand of the state is supposed to recede from economic life…

In the President’s telling, our vast public entitlement system is really only there to redress “risk” (and the need caused by risk).

But if this were true, we would expect the claims upon our nation’s entitlement system to diminish as the level of economic “risk” (and need) lessen, wouldn’t we?