Passage of the day....

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It's supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O'Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you're the child.

From this Mark Steyn piece.

As Steyn argues, and as Machiavelli understood, sloth, laziness and seeking painless living, is a dark enemy of a republic and leads to the sclerotic rotting away of personal freedoms. I do not look forward to what becomes of the recent jolting movements towards encompassing socialism that will result, in my humble opinion, in an eventual gutting of personal freedoms as created to the American founding fathers and codified in the American Constitution.

And as far as the claimed African proverb, it may take a village to raise a child, but it does not take a Federal Government to do so. But as it works today, it takes a village to raise a child and it takes that child to economically support that village's profligacy and indolence.