The excellent Kevin Williamson, from "Travails, Chinese and American" in the pages of National Review Online, March 7, 2011. Notes Williamson (picture on right):
"Our worst problem is that democratic governments lack the kind of robust fiscal controls that prevent the political class from pillaging the productive economy to feather the nests of its own members and their clients….At every level — federal, state, local, county, school district, sewage-treatment authority — we have disfigured our institutions such that they function principally as wealth-transfer mechanisms for the benefit of the political class. The word for this is “corruption,” and it is at least as much a moral problem as an economic one. We are our own disease."
