And get heart disease because the beef industry has attractive commercials, and then try to find affordable medical care.

You go right ahead and live in your rightist's Optimist World. When things turn weird and awful -- as they always do after excessively optimistic excessive periods of excessive excess -- the only ones with a ladder will be the ones who saw the hole all the time.

The left is essentially pessimistic, and expects the worst from people, and so tries to set up social structures to correct for people's ill treatment of each other. Some people who have started out with leftist philosophy have fallen prey to the very lust for power and domination of others that leftist philosophies warn against. They take those social structures and turn them into organisms of oppression.

The right's boundless optimism is just as oppressive in its own way. The notion that people will be good to each other given the opportunity is belied by codes of law going all the way back to Hammurabi. The settlement of the American West was fuelled by boundless optimism, and while there were many individual acts of neighborliness and kindness, the whole period was marked by great violence and brutality. The right's brand of optimism also implies that an individual's failure is all his own fault, and so excuses and sometimes even celebrates the abandonment of the wounded and the unlucky as the shedding of dead wood.

If you think that "telling the people what they want to hear" is good for sales, you're right. The tobacco industry told the people what they wanted to hear for years. It hasn't made lungs any healthier. Ignorance may be bliss, but it sets people up for nasty surprises later.

For an example of the left's philosophy of social improvement gone awry, I'm sure you'd rather select the Soviet Union, informed as it was by centuries of autocracy. I prefer something a little closer to home, and more accurate in its reflection of leftist saving people from themselves: Prohibition. People think about Eliot Ness and tend to forget that this was a Progressive initiative. It was just as wrong-headed in its left way as the right is to leave drunks and drug addicts sleeping it off in the alleys and their frightened families to slug it out with poverty and illness, waiting for us to be good to each other.

The left without the right is a scolding bossyboots; the right without the left is a selfish bully.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.