No government can or ever will be able to create the kinds of technological and medical advances that Americans increasingly take for granted. Governments can only effectively fulfill the role of the jailers, the police officers and the upholders of private contracts. Force, not creativity and ingenuity, is the only arena in which government can excel. Unfortunately, in mixed welfare-market economies such as ours, governments have been given the power to seize, “manage” or redistribute the products of man’s efforts—but only after the products or technologies are discovered and mass-produced by willing, productive individuals.

Most “liberal” and “conservative” politicians understand this fact, which is why so few of them are ideologically committed to full-scale socialism. They realize that productive individuals must be left free enough to produce a sizable tax base so that the enterprise of government may continue at the involuntary expense of those who provide the wealth in the first place. 

Many people have this idea that the purpose of therapy is to “deal with the past.” I suspect they get this idea from all those silly authors who appear on “Oprah” and elsewhere. The interesting thing is: What does “dealing with the past” actually mean? Perhaps it means talking about the past. I know that I sometimes do this with therapy clients. They tell me about their parents, their siblings, and how things were for them while growing up. We talk about the impact this had on them, up through and including the present.

Someone sent me an interesting quote, attributed to Mark Twain: "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on... or by imbeciles who really mean it."

Let's apply this to the presidential candidates for 2012.