Absorbed by the State

Lew Rockwell on how every anti-State idea the Right has advanced over the past decades has been twisted into a pro-State agenda by Bush. An example:

In the last 60 years, the energies of free-market intellectuals have been spent on debunking the need for the social welfare state. But these energies are now being used to expand rather than shrink the state. Consider the cry to "privatize" Social Security. It uses the good work of many great thinkers to debunk a bad system, so that it can be recreated with a wholly new system of forced savings that could end up worse than the original.

The anti-Social Security movement that has existed since the 1930s is being re-channeled into a pro-forced savings movement. A further tragedy: all the efforts of the past to debunk Social Security now risk being discredited when this new program turns out to be wildly expensive, terribly coercive, dangerous to the independence of capital markets, and ultimately fruitless for workers who put their hopes in it. But meanwhile, the energies of the anti-Social Security movement will have been spent.