I’ve long believed — for reasons very similar to, but less refined than, those offered by my colleague Bryan Caplan — that the modern state brings out the children in us.
Thomas Sowell thinks so, too. Here’s a slice of his latest column:
The most childish of all the things being said in the august setting of a joint session of Congress last week was that millions of people can be added to the government’s health insurance plan without increasing the federal deficit at all.
If the president of the United States could do that, it is hard to imagine what he would do as an encore. Walking on water would be an anticlimax.
What is equally childish is the notion that the great majority of Americans, who have medical insurance and who say they are satisfied with it, should be panicked and stampeded into supporting vast increases in the arbitrary power of Washington bureaucrats to take medical decisions out of the hands of their doctors – all ostensibly because a minority of Americans do not have medical insurance.
