The Review
A Palestinian State and Terrorism
(
Review) Reader Mike Daley informs me that Orrin Judd, who supports the immediate creation of a Palestinian State, disagrees with my arguments below about the inadvisability of doing so while Palestine remains such a have for terrorism.
There's an understandable but absurd bit of juvenalia going on among the hawks, who are insisting that continued terrorism proves that the Palestinians don't deserve a state or even a plan for one. It's worth considering that had the same logic been applied to the terrorists from 1945-48 there would be no Israel.
The problem with this argument is that, unlike the Palestinian Authority, there was no Israeli Government until May 5, 1948. Currently, there
is a Palestinian authority, with its own officially recognized police/security forces, who do have the ability to clamp down on terrorist activities if they were so inclined. The PA
could do so, rather than singing paeans of praise to the terrorists.
But they don't.
You can talk about the Irgun or the Stern Gang until you're blue in the face, but there is a distinct difference between terrorist gangs operating without any central authority, and a Palestinian Authority that actively aids and abets terrorists, allows open recruitment of youths for terror, pays bounties to their families, maintains--in the form of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades--its own terrorist infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.
And, of course, at that time, Arabs were just as involved in terrorist activities as the Irgun or the Stern Gang. And, similarly, neither of them really had a government, except for the British, whom both sides despised equally.
In any event, once you implement a governmental or quasi-governmental authority, and invest it with peace keeping powers, the responsibility to eliminate terrorism is inherent in that authority. That is something the Palestinians have now, and that the Jews did not have in 1946-1948. Once the Jewish state was created, the Jews DID clamp down on terrorism, albeit at the price of legitimizing of much of the Irgun and Stern membership. By contrast, the PA has gone out of its way to do precisely the opposite.
Moreover, I don't actually give a damn what the British, Jews, and Arabs did or did not do half a century ago. That's the past, and, while it may have some instructive lessons for us, one of the chief of them has been that, for the past half century, the prime mover of terrorism in the middle east has come from the Palestinian, or more generally, the Arab side. It has not, after all, been the Israelis whose publicly declared purpose over much of the last 50 years has been to drive the Arabs into the sea.
While the Israelis have spent the last 50 years expiating their pre-state sins by building a tolerant Western democracy, The Arabs have spent it by giving money to the likes of Yasser Arafat, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, et al., or producing such stellar,benign, and peace-loving leaders as Hafez Assad, Saddam Hussein, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the like, not to mention the numerous inherited despotisms with which the Arab world is cluttered. Oh, and of course, let's not forget unprovoked, direct military attacks on the Israelis in 1948, 1967, and 1973.
There has been a lot of history since 1948, and the Arabs have mainly been on the wrong side of it. The onus is on them to prove that they are now willing to reject that past, and to allow the existence of what so many of them still refer to as the "Jewish Entity".
To argue otherwise is simply obtuse.
A Blinding glimpse of the obvious
(
Review) I said the BCRA was unconstitutional when the President Bush signed it. So did he for that matter, which made his signing highly improper in my view. But now it's official. A three-judge panel of the DC Court of Appeals has tossed out both the ban on soft-money contributions, and the ban on political ads by third parties, presumably on 1st Amendment grounds (I haven't seen the opinion yet).
If you really want campaign finance reform, eliminate
all contributions except individual contributions. Individual contributions can be unlimited, as long as it is the individual's own money, not transferred for a third party. Finally, all contributions must be publicly disclosed on a regular and frequent basis.
But the BCRA was certainly not the answer.
Worth a thousand words
(
Review) C'mon, can you
really imagine Al Gore like this?
VDH on Europe
(
Review) Victor Davis Hanson writes that it's time for the French, Russians, Germans, and Belgians to get a little tough love.
Keeping Tabs on the Occupation
(
Review) Charles Krauthammer identifies what the US has done wrong--and right--so far in the occupation of Iraq.
The administration erred, however, by going initially for an occupation "light." It did so understandably at first, victory having come so swiftly and crushingly that there were no existing institutions such as police or army to fill the vacuum and simply not enough American soldiers for adequate seizure of full power.
But there also appeared to be a conscious decision to downplay the occupation, lest we stoke Iraqi nationalism and resistance. This was a mistake, rooted, as are most Middle East mistakes, in the inextinguishable myth of the "Arab street." The critics always predict that the "street" will rise at any show of American power. It invariably rises at any show of American weakness or indecision; it becomes quiescent at the showing of American power.
Our problem in postwar Iraq has been a paucity of force rather than an excess. The way to succeed is with an occupation "heavy." The administration is hurriedly sending in about 4,000 more soldiers, heavy with MPs, and not a moment too soon. Occupation light has permitted the ad hoc seizure of power in pockets of the country by various ambitious nasties. America needs to fill the vacuum, so it can then devolve power to those committed to a truly democratic outcome.
What the administration has done right, on the other hand, has been to exclude all the foreign latecomers and meddlers who want to get in on the reconstruction. The administration gave the perfect response to the U.N. claim that it alone can confer legitimacy on the running of Iraq: We ignored it.
It does not even merit a rejoinder. The idea that legitimacy flows from the blessings of France and Russia, Saddam's lawyers and suppliers, is on its face risible. Legitimacy does not come out of U.N. headquarters in New York; it will come out of the ground in Iraq, as more and more factions join in the construction of a provisional government.
We did not bring democracy to Germany and Japan by the lightness of out touch after WWII.
Paying their respects
(
Review) Dorothy Rabbinowitz writes that Americans have other things on their minds that punishing celebrities for unpopular views.
As at Cpl. Evnin's funeral, crowds lined the streets. Brian's uncle Paul Finegan pondered the problems getting to the cemetery in Concord--a 150-car cortege traveling 50 miles on the busiest highway in New England. He had, it turned out, nothing to fear: 50 state troopers, many of them coming in from days off, had closed most of the road for them, a stretch of 35 miles.
Then came another sight he could scarcely believe. At the side of the road, near their halted cars, stood streams of people, standing at attention--paying their respects.
"They stopped all these cars, and people got out to stand holding their hands over their hearts," he marveled.
He should not have been surprised. Scenes like this are the reason all the celebrity protesters can stop worrying about public wrath and punishment. Americans have other things on their minds all right. September 11, for one. What they have on their minds, too, since the just-concluded remarkable war, is the consciousness of who they are and what this society is that it should have produced men and women of the kind who fought in that war and died in it.
People got a powerfully close look at their fellow Americans in uniform these last weeks. This is what impels them now to stand at roadsides in tribute, heedless of where else they had to go. And this is why strangers flock to funerals.
Read the whole article. It's well worth your time.
In "Palestine", Music Videos Are...Different
Review) In a perfect accompaniement to what I just wrote, Washington
Times Editor-In-Chief Wes Pruden describes a catchby, popular music video playing on Official Palestinian Authority Television.
The words to the music, which every Palestinian child will want to sing on the road to peace--or at least to the peace process--urges killing Jews and seeks to inspire with scenes of masked gunmen firing their AK-47s, and aerial photographs of targeted Israeli towns, of an Israeli couple on a stroll and of groups of teenage Israeli girls. Young Palestinian men are encouraged--usually by old Palestinian men who keep themselves carefully out of harm's way--to prove their manhood by killing women and children, the frailer, the smaller, the more vulnerable the better.
The Palestinian "martyrs" of Hamas and Fatah, armed with the new road map, celebrated the beginning of the journey by dispatching a homicide bomber to kill three Israelis and wound 55--the dead after these bombings are often more fortunate than the hideously wounded--in a seaside pub just a few dozen yards from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Message sent, if not necessarily received.
Again, this is characteristic of fanaticism, rather than an indication that the PA is tending toward a regime of moderate nation-building.
The "Road Map" to Mideast Peace
(
Review) Roland Watson writes for the
Times of London that the president's skeptics are mistaken if they believe he isn't committed to the "Road Map" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mr Bush's record on the Middle East is not as one-sided as it is often portrayed. He has certainly been reluctant to get involved up to now, delaying publication of the road map. But he is the first President to call for a sovereign Palestine, he is committed to a two-state solution, and he rebuffed Israeli attempts to make last-minute changes to the road map. He has also cleared the way for progress. In toppling Saddam he removed the greatest regional threat to Israel, and in side-lining Yassir Arafat he has removed the greatest obstacle to peace.
If and when Mr Bush becomes involved, his role will differ markedly from that of his predecessor. US officials say Mr Bush will not "take ownership" of the peace process, meaning he will not burn the midnight oil trying to pull the sides together, as President Clinton did, if they are not willing partners.
But there are signs that the White House believes that there is an historic opening for peace, and is prepared to exploit the lessons of the 31-month-old Palestinian uprising: that the Israeli economy cannot continue haemorrhaging (US financial support is not finite, whisper some officials), and that the Palestinians will never get a state unless they crack down on terrorism.
That is the crux of the issue, for more than any presidential commitment. Any peace between Israel and the notional "Palestine" will require a real commitment on the part of the Palestinians to stamp out terror, something that it is by no means clear that they can do.
The Palestinian Authority, like many other Arab political officialdoms, has regularly praised suicide bombing. Israelis are portrayed as Nazis in Palestinian media. Every problem imaginable in the PA is attributed to Israeli perfidy. Unless the PA is willing to take responsibility for its own lookout, rather than heaping contumely on Israel, their ability to control terrorism will be negligible.
The Palestinian leadership has spent an entire lifetime as bomb-throwers, in both the rhetorical sense as well as the real one. But building a stable orderly country requires a host of skills other than bomb-throwing and blaming Israeli scapegoats for your problems.
No matter how committed Bush may be to bringing an end to this conflict--and make no mistake, this is a President who is serious about his commitments--without the key ingredient of Palestinian willingness to create a state of their own, rather than trying to destroy the Israeli one, any "road map" will be a guide to nowhere.
Just like Bill Pullman in "Independence Day"
When was the last time you saw a President of the Unted States get into a flight suit and fly a military jet? Just asking.
Apology
Sorry that blogging has been so scarce for the past few days. Unfortunately, I am in crisis mode on a software project, and am just too jammed for time, to be able to blog regularly. Hopefully, I can unbury myself over the next few days.
Steyn Speaks
(
Review) MArk Steyn doesn't feel much like allowing the UN to take over in post-war Iraq, and for good reason.
The Congo is a useful reminder of the laziness of the term "Western imperialism." There's Belgian imperialism, which, as the Congo continues to demonstrate, is a sewer. And then there's Anglo-Saxon nation-building, which, from India to Belize, works quite well, given the chance. St Lucia, Mauritius, Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea, to pluck four at random, have enjoyed the attributes of a free society a lot longer than, say, Greece, Portugal and Spain, which were dictatorships a quarter-century ago. The argument of my old friend Ghazi Algosaibi, the Saudi Minister of Water, that freedom is "European" is not borne out by the facts. If Latin Americans, Pacific islanders, and even the Muslims of south Asia can live in liberty, it's surely a little racist to suggest that Arabs are uniquely incapable of so doing. Had Britain begun administering Mesopotamia in 1877 instead of 1917, we wouldn't even be asking the question.
But if you want to turn a long-shot into a surefire failure, there's no better way than handing post-war Iraq from the Americans to the UN -- the successors to the Belgian school of nation-building. At best, you'll end up with Cambodia, where the UN has colluded in the nullification of democracy, or the Balkans, where once-functioning jurisdictions are reduced to the level of geopolitical tenements with the UN as slum landlord in perpetuity. At worst, you'll wind up with the West Bank "refugee" "camps,"the most extreme reminder of how the UN has little interest in solving problems, only in establishing bureaucracies to manage them. Washington should ignore the French, dare the Russians to veto, let the Iraqis turn on the spigots, and pay no attention to "do-gooders."
We'd be utter fools to allow these guys a chance to run the show now.
A Widow's View of Gun Accountability
(
Review) Denise Johnson, widow of one of the DC sniper victims, wants to go after the manufacturer of the sniper weapon. This is ridiculous, with all respect to Ms. Johnson's grief.
Guns don't fall from the sky or grow on trees. The two people charged with my husband's murder could not have legally bought this gun. They were able to get the gun only because of a wholly irresponsible gun dealer, Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Wash. Bull's Eye says it did not even realize the sniper suspects' Bushmaster assault rifle was missing from its inventory until after the police arrested the suspects and traced the gun to the gun store. Only then did Bull's Eye report it as "stolen." Bull's Eye also cannot account for more than 200 other guns that mysteriously disappeared from its shelves.
Bushmaster, the manufacturer that supplied Bull's Eye, also bears some responsibility. To begin with, I don't understand why Bushmaster would sell this military-style assault rifle to the civilian public. This is not a gun for hunters or home defense. It is a gun for the military or law enforcement. Not only does Bushmaster push these military guns on the public, it even sells something it calls the "ultimate sniper grip." Bushmaster should be more responsible, and it should require its dealers, such as Bull's Eye, to act responsibly. Bushmaster now knows that Bull's Eye cannot account for more than 200 guns, and that one of those guns was used in a killing rampage. But Bushmaster continues to call Bull's Eye a "good customer."
Well, presumably, they are a good customer. Manufacturers are not, as a general rule, responsible for the actions of retailers.
Now, the people at Bull's Eye are responsible. Clearly, an argument can be made for negligence on their part. But Bushmaster did not fail to secure the weapons properly. Bushmaster did not allow the weapons to be stolen. All Bushmaster did was sell its products to a licensed gun dealer for legal public sale. It is not Bushmaster's responsibility to regulate what retailers do with its products.
The whole purpose behind going after gun manufacturers is to make business so expensive for them that they shut down, plain and simple. The reason congress is considering exempting them from these types of lawsuits is because to allow them is to hold gun manufacturers to a standard of legal culpability that no other manufacturers must meet. The law is a necessary tool to keep the gun-banners from trying to pull a legal end-around to shut down gun manufacturing, and thereby accomplish a goal they have been unable to achieve through legislative action.
And, by the way, what is this?
I don't understand why Bushmaster would sell this military-style assault rifle to the civilian public. This is not a gun for hunters or home defense. It is a gun for the military or law enforcement. Not only does Bushmaster push these military guns on the public, it even sells something it calls the "ultimate sniper grip.
Bushmaster does it because it's legal to do so, and the public desires it. My copy of the Constitution doesn't confine the right to bear arms to hunting or home protection purposes.
Thankfully, Ms. Johnson is not the arbiter of our Second Amendment rights.
Happy Birthday to You...
(
Review) Today is the birthday of Saddam Hussein. assuming, of course, that he's still alive.
Hollywood's Free Speech
(
Review) Jonah Golberg dissects the Hollywood Left's concer for free speech.
Okay, let's recap. "Intimidation" of free speech is a moral horror. Democracy means never being criticized. And, the refusal to sponsor speech you don't like amounts to having one's "right to work" repealed. This is childish. Oh, I don't mean childish as in silly, I mean literally this is childish. This is the way children talk and think, especially in our gitchy-goo self-esteem culture. Not understanding the difference between their desires and rights, they insist they are entitled to do whatever it is they are doing. No matter what they do with their crayons, children expect to be told "That's so good. Good for you." Any criticism elicits a tantrum about the unfairness of it all. Maybe it's because Hollywood types live as King Babies and are never told they're wrong about anything, or maybe their view of democracy is one in which they are the customers of expensive restaurants and the rest of the world are simply waiters. Waiters are supposed to receive criticism with intelligence and geniality but never, ever, talk back.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Revoking Moore's Oscar?
(
Review) FOXNews has a little story about
revoketheoscar.com, and its campaign to have Michael Moore's Oscar for
Bowling for Columbine revoked.
I don't know if that has much of a chance at succeeding, but it occurs to me that it is a bit odd for Tim Robbins to claim there's some vast, right-wing conspiracy in Hollywood that wants to punish him for his Lefty political positions, when it was those Hollywood people who voted to give the Oscar to Michael Moore.
Invective Without Rancor
(
Review) Bill Safire happily informs us that the art of invective is making a comeback. As a fairly sharp polemicist, I'm happy about it, too. There's nothing wrong with vigorous and sharp debate.
John Leo on Santorum
(
Review) John Leo is perplexed by the over-reaction to Senator Rick Santorum's comments on the Supreme Court and homosexuality.
The hullabaloo over Sen. Rick Santorum is another one of those flaps that deeply upset people in newsrooms and faculty lounges but that don't seem very controversial out in the real world. Santorum, it seems to me, made three strong points in his April 7 interview with the Associated Press: (1) The Supreme Court has created a right to privacy found nowhere in the Constitution. (2) The senator believes in the traditional male-female version of marriage and thinks homosexual acts, adultery, and bigamy are "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family." (3) The Supreme Court is preparing to rule on a Texas law that forbids gay sexual acts. If the court says there is a constitutional right to consensual sex, Santorum says, "then you would have the right" to bigamy, polygamy, adultery, and incest.
All three points are obvious. I would say they are blindingly obvious. First, it's a fact that the Constitution says nothing about privacy. Point 2 is an orthodox Roman Catholic position, and since Santorum is an orthodox Roman Catholic, nobody should be surprised that he believes this. Point 3 is nearly as orthodox in current legal thinking as Point 2 is at the Vatican. The Supreme Court will very likely strike down the Texas law that criminalizes gay sexual acts (why else take the case?). If it does, no matter what principle it relies on--privacy, consent, equal protection--that principle will inevitably be legally applied to many other sexual acts and arrangements. Lots of gay activists believe this, too. Why Santorum can't say it is a mystery.
If so, then why all the hullabaloo? I think it's because Senator Santorum phrased his remarks carelessly. But, as Leo also reminds us, there are rules of debate to follow even when your opponent speaks carelessly.
In my high school, the Jesuits used to tell us that in debate, we should do our opponents the honor of going to the heart of their arguments--no nickel-and-diming about poor phrasing, tone, slips of the tongue, or faulty juxtapositions. This would be a revolutionary approach in Washington. But they might want to try it there anyway.
It seems to me like Santorum's critics are ignoring the substantive positions the senator was trying to express, and piling on because they didn't like the way he phrased them. That might be a good way to demonize Rick Santorum, but it's not an especially illuminating way of responding to his arguments.
Hentoff on Castro
(
Review) Civil libertarian Nat Hentoff is as bemused as I am by the way the Left fawns over the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro.
At one point, interviewing the already legendary Che Guevara--an international Cuban revolutionary icon--at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, I asked him if he could foresee, anytime in the future, free elections in Cuba. Crisply dressed in his military outfit, Mr. Guevara burst out laughing at my callow naivete.
Having interviewed Cubans who survived Mr. Castro's gulags, I have never understood or respected the parade of American entertainers, politicians and intellectuals who travel to Cuba to be entranced by this ruthless dictator who, for me, has all the charisma of a preening thug, akin to any killer on "The Sopranos."
These Castro-philes are among those who discredit liberalism because they're unable to recognize and be repelled by unbridled evil. Consider Steven Spielberg, who has developed impressive resources through his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, to keep alive the horrifying presence of the Holocaust. Yet, as quoted in the April 11 Wall Street Journal, Mr. Spielberg described his audience with Mr. Castro last November, as "the eight most important hours of my life."
Was Spielberg's life that barren until those gloriously transcendent hours with the chief warden of Cuba's prisons?
Evidently so.
The Devil's Dictionary
(
Review) Adam Sparks is a veritable Ambrose Bierce. And in the SF
Chronicle, too. Here's a tiny sampling.
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD): A new disease cured by taking bright kids bored to tears by the poor academic curriculum in our public schools and drugging them to death.
Basic Rights: New rights not found anywhere in the Constitution that include the right for slackers to get free food, free housing, free medical care and conjugal visits in prison, plus permission to deal drugs, defecate in the streets and aggressively panhandle, as well as get enough welfare money to trade their cars in every three years.
People of Color: The current politically correct appellation for minorities. We've come a long way since that very offensive term "colored people."
Underrepresented Minority, an: A minority who isn't from a group that does too well in the classroom, like the Chinese or Japanese.
I'd give you some more, but then you might not be tempted to read the whole thing.
Cuba's Special Brand of Hell
(
Review) Juan Carlos González Leyva is a Cuban political prisoner. That is an unpleasant thing to be in Cuba, as his letter attests.
But, as the Left assures us with its usual moral vacuity, Cuba provides a free education and health care to its citizens. Certainly, that's worth facing imprisonment and torture for dissent, isn't it?
Pre-Empting the Future
(
Review) Jonathon Rauch writes that the Bush tax cuts are unwise, and will have a deleterious effect on national finances. A lengthy quote is necessary to see the gist of his argument:
Bush's bold initiative in Iraq looks irresponsible to his critics because it takes great risks for uncertain benefits. His tax-cutting fits the same mold. There is, however, an important difference. The most destabilizing problem in the geopolitical world right now is the lack of democracy in the Arab world; liberating Iraq will almost by definition be a step in the right direction. The most destabilizing problem in the fiscal world is the high cost of paying pension and health care costs for Baby Boom retirees; cutting taxes, however, is almost by definition a step in the wrong direction.
If Social Security and Medicare stay on their present courses, according to the systems' trustees, by 2030 they will absorb a third of every income-tax dollar, in addition to their dedicated payroll-tax revenues; by 2040, almost half. After that, it gets worse. By midcentury, entitlement programs for the elderly will cost twice as much as today, relative to national income.
In a recent paper for the National Center for Policy Analysis [A conservative think-tank, by the way--DF] ("Is War Between Generations Inevitable?"), Jagadeesh Gokhale and Laurence J. Kotlikoff -- economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and Boston University, respectively -- calculate the total fiscal burden that each of several generations will face. They find an immense imbalance, with the government's policy strongly favoring current generations at the expense of future ones. "The [2001] Bush tax cut," they argue, "worsened the generational imbalance...by about one-fifth at a time when it was already huge." Further tax cuts this year would do more of the same.
As if to drive home the point, Bush's budget contains one new big-ticket item, for (who else?) the elderly. His prescription drug benefit would add $400 billion to the cost of Medicare over 10 years, with costs soaring as Baby Boomers retire. Democrats, of course, would like to add even more. Then there is the alternative minimum tax. Bush and everyone else agrees that it should be prevented from biting deep into middle-class pockets, but fixing it will cost anywhere from $300 billion to $600 billion. The bulk of those bills would begin coming due late in this decade. After Bush is gone.
No matter how much one desires lower taxes and smaller government, the fact is that there is a danger in such a large tax cut.
Every penny we borrow now is a penny that will have to be paid back by the next generation. If the government were to lower taxes, and pay for the reduced revenues through lower spending, rather than increased deficits, that would be a good thing. There are two reasons, however, why that will not happen.
First, the culture in Washington is one of spending. Congressmen and Senators do not get re-elected by cutting programs and spending that benefit their districts. There is, after all, a reason why Robert Byrd had been a Senator from West Virginia since Christ was a corporal, and it has a lot to do with the fact that nearly every free-standing structure in the state is named after him as a tribute to his ability to funnel federal largess into defraying the cost of its construction. Politicians who perform in the manner of Sen. Byrd get re-elected. The very nature of congressional culture is one of spending money by dispensing Federal largess to their constituents. This is not an atmosphere in which principled attachment to spending reduction has a great prospect of success.
Second, the baby boom population is on the verge of retirement, and we've promised them quite a lot of money, which gives them a huge claim on the Federal budget. In 2003, Social Security and Medicare alone are projected take up over 44% of the Federal Budget. And that share is expanding by nearly 1% per year, so ten years from now, we are looking at 54% of the federal budget going to those two programs alone. At the same time, those boomers will have to be supported by a smaller and smaller working population, i.e. a shrinking tax base.
Social Security and Medicare are also mandatory programs, which means that their spending can't be cut as part of the regular budget process, but require a special act of congress, to trim spending, or even to trim the rate of spending increase. If you add in all the other mandatory programs, fully 62% of the budget is non-discretionary. That leaves only 38% of the budget available for spending cuts. Of that amount, nearly 50% goes to pay for national defense.
As a practical matter that means that, at the end of the day, the pressure for more government borrowing, rather than cutting spending, is likely to be overwhelming. If so, then the regime of low taxes will be one of relatively short duration. We can't borrow money indefinitely, whether we are talking about our own credit cards, or the federal government's finances. So, taxes will have to be raised to provide revenues commensurate with the Federal spending we demand.
If we want low taxes, and I certainly do, then we have to embark upon a fundamental examination about what we want the federal government to do, what should be privatized, and what should be eliminated. Maybe we will have to privatize social security, or even (gasp) medicare. Perhaps we may have to means-test them, as we do other entitlements. Perhaps we will have to shed--finally--the Rural Electrification Administration. Perhaps our entire system of taxation will have to be evaluated.
Having government services and benefits costs money. If we are unwilling to pay that money, then we have to decide what government goodies we are going to give up in return. If we want to keep all those government goodies, then we are going to have to pony up the cash to pay for them.
There's no free lunch.
