onairbil

Welfare State?

This is the monolith which confronts Mr Obama (and every other Head of State) in his professed desire to better the lot of the people who have just elected him as president. It was brilliantly described well over 150 years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous work - Democracy In America:
“The government covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”