from Our Economy Is More Like China’s and Europe’s Than We Care to Admit by Kevin Williamson at National Review:

We got Medicare, Medicaid, and government housing projects. It impossible to calculate (and nearly impossible to imagine) what the country would look like if in 1950 we’d had the foresight and imagination to instead create a retirement system based on the accumulation of real assets by individuals and families rather than transfer payments, an education system invigorated by choice and competition, a health-care system taking into account the understanding that insurance is a financial product rather than a medical product, an immigration system oriented toward the importation of wealth and creativity rather than the importation of poverty, a federal government that governed instead of acting as a favor bank (literally, Mr. Vice President) for politically connected business interests, a tax system that was an instrument of revenue rather than an instrument of politics, etc. An extra 1 percent of GDP going toward real investments from 1950 forward would have radically changed our economic landscape, and, indeed, the world’s.

We’re stuck in the welfare-state two-step: When times are good and the money is flowing freely, there’s no urgency for reform; when times are bad, reform is held to be cruel. We cannot cut spending during the booms or the busts. This moment, which is neither the one nor the other, is as opportune a time as any to begin the long and difficult project of raising our return on the advantages with which the world has once again presented us.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421246/american-economic-complacency-china

HKO

We are in the third phase of our century long experiment with progressivism.  Originally progressivism was an effort to adapt government to new realities, but the movement has not adapted to the realities of a century of progress. It is now Hillary and the modern progressives who are stuck in the past and regurgitating old failed policies.

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