A Tale Of Two Styles

Here is Charles Krauthammer countering President Obama's claim that private enterprise owes its success to modern, liberal government.

"Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.

"The argument between Left and Right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation; about geometrically expanding entitlements; about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure."

And here is Mark Steyn saying essentially the same thing.

"Halfway through the first millennium b.c., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court over 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G-7 today."

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/310166/golden-gateway-dependency-mark-steyn

(Krauthammer's column is refenenced in my previous post.)