A government of the people’s every wish?
20th March 2011
Anne Applebaum points out some inconvenient truth.
If you don’t live in this country all of the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.
March 20th, 2011 at 10:26
Applebaum seems to confuse “the public” with the editorials of newspapers she reads. I live along the Gulf and I don’t know anyone who blamed the White House for the oil rig explosion. Then again, I live among the real people, not journalists, lawyers, or professors.
March 20th, 2011 at 12:35
But it’s the journalists, lawyers, and professors who show up in the public forum — and those are the people whose views are propagated, and to whom the government gives most weight. The day is long gone where ‘real people’ had any input into the system, unless they gather together into unruly crowds, whereupon they are castigated as ‘teabaggers’.