But the core principle holds. Able-bodied adults who live at the unwilling expense of others degrade themselves even as they demean those forced to support them.

He shows a video of students asked about a proposal to redistribute grade-point averages by forcing the “rich” (high-GPA students) to give some of their grade points to the “poor.” Put on the spot this way, students are awkward in their attempts to articulate why it is wrong to redistribute grades even though it is right to redistribute income.

Government employees are the last bastion of unionization, and I have sympathy for government workers. Having no competition, governmental bodies have little pressure to improve practices – other than the unions. But I have no doubt that governments will eventually learn to outsource to competitive private firms. As that happens, unions will gradually disappear. Sure, some vestigial traces will be found in dinosaur companies like GM and Boeing, but this too shall pass. Unions were great when they were needed, but so was the telegraph.

For instance, as the imperialist frenzy spread and began to converge on hostility to Spain and Spanish policy in Cuba, a Boston stockbroker voiced the views of many of his class when he complained to Senator Lodge that what businessmen really wanted was “peace and quiet.” He added, with amazing prescience, “If we attempt to regulate the affairs of the whole world we will be in hot water from now until the end of time.”

Preposterous rules in Florida do not allow renters to pay water bills of foreclosed landlords who have closed accounts. The result is many surprised tenants wake up one morning, find their water shut off, and have no way to get it turned back on.

The Ryan plan seeks to preserve entitlement programs by reforming them. Democrats oppose any change and pretend to believe that those programs can continue intact; but no one who can add and subtract actually believes that. If entitlement programs are not reformed so that they become sustainable, they must inevitably be repealed. That is the choice: reform or repeal.

As the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey notes at the end of her book on why the west grew rich, “in the long run the acceptance of creative destruction relieved poverty. It has been in fact the only effective relief. Wage regulations and protection and other progressive legislation, contrary to their sweet (and self-gratifying) motives, have only preserved poverty.”* McCloskey understands what Hayek understood: prosperity comes only to societies that welcome entrepreneurial-driven economic change – only to societies steeped in the realization that better tomorrows are impossible if everyone is protected from every economic disappointment today. Societies that reject this reality seal themselves in the awful amber of poverty.