Let’s start this post the way I ended the one before. Our population is getting older. Labor force participation is down. The average worker is getting poorer. The average adult is getting fatter and sicker. There are fewer intact families, and less family support. Jobs are very temporary, even among those who still have actual jobs. Unions have disappeared except in the public sector, where they have become another part of the ruling class getting richer as the expense of most workers. People are moving around the country, spending their childhood and getting their education in one state, their working and taxpaying years in one or more different states, and their retirement in yet another state. Leaving friends, family, church and community behind – often far behind. More people are dying early, and becoming disabled early. With a cradle to grave welfare system and an otherwise fractured and mobile society, a relationship with the federal government is becoming the only relationship most Americans will have from cradle to grave.
All these factors are likely to turn the federal government, more and more, into just an insurance company that also has an army, a government that is less and less able to accomplish much of anything else. Trying to change this long-term trend, given our economic, demographic and social conditions, would likely cause a social collapse with far more suffering and early death than is taking place already. There is lots of bad news about this, but perhaps a little good news as well. That good news has something to do with the views of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech.