<You and I aren't that many years away from the latter category, Tom. Your perspective may change when you're the one in need of help from the government.

I'm arranging to try and support myself in my old age, which is what grownups used to do before the government decided everyone over 65 needed to be a ward of the state. After doing the calculations on the Social Security funds, I'm not holding my breath that I am going to see any of my money again.

However, unless I'm rich, I will probably have to use Medicare, since the government has seen to it that it is no longer possible to purchase comprehensive health insurance in this country for older people. By that time, of course, Medicare will have decayed to the level of most socialized medicine, with strict rationing and waiting, and I'll be lucky to get any medical care at all.

Right now all the government needs the elderly to do is jump up and beg when they dangle their alms in front of them. That, and (after being reminded who owns them) getting to a voting booth. Whether any of them actually get decent health care or retirements is irrelevant, as long as they have no other choices.

It's depressing. There are too damn many socialists in our government.

Not surprising, since they are attracted to political power like flies to a dungpile, while those who believe that people live best when left alone have not the slightest desire to go to Washington and tell other people what to do, and get selected out of the system.

Natural selection--governments tend to select for collectivists and authoritarians. The Founding Fathers knew this and tried to create a governmental system hamstrung to the point where power lust could do as little damage as possible, but most of those safeguards were long ago "interpreted" out of the Constitution. Too bad.

John Conyers submitted yet another Single Payer health care bill last month. This is something which, with little publicity, he and his "progressive" colleagues have been doing steadily, year after year, with endless patience, like the guy in the hockey mask chopping slowly and repeatedly at your stout front door with a hatchet. Single payer. The Holy Grail of the Left. When they pull this off, there will be no aspect of your life that does not come under their legitimate control as sole provider of your health care. God, you think they get on your neck now about what you smoke or the car you drive...