Liberals: "free" people who yearn to be slaves.

Any respectable liberal will howl and render his or, preferably, her garments at the possibility that their international phone calls to their terrorist progressive friends will be intercepted by "Shrub" when he's tired of playing tiddly winks in the Oval Office with Dick "OK Corral" Cheney. (I've tried as hard as I can to capture their likely manner of expressing this complex idea.)

However, any political measure that destroys federalism, enhances the taxing and spending powers of Congress, or otherwise goes as far as possible in diluting the Original Constitution yet further is absolutely ok with them.

However, I am loathe to call inequality a problem that requires a government solution. I do not see how it solves the problem to take power away from wealthy people who have a lot of it in order to increase the power of politicians who have far more of it.

What the American people really should feel awkward and defensive about is the level of inequality and excess of political power.

Liberals love to think how the "rich" or the "greedy," "polluting," "resource-wasting" "capitalists" get it in the neck when some new socialist or statist nostrum slithers into the statute books. Little do they know, remember, contemplate, or care how the income tax when it first appeared was only going to apply to "the rich" and then only to the tune of 4% of their income. (I think I'm close on that figure.) When all was said to revamp and undermine America by 1990, the average American family of four paid 24% of its income in income and employment taxes. In 1948, the same family paid . . . come on, guess now . . . a whopping 2% of its income.

Somehow, the schemes that liberals devise to stick it to the rich and greedy (liberals are never greedy) end up landing square on the backs of the middle class. On them, too, it turns out. Necessitating new measures to soak the rich.

Such is liberal logic. Beggar thy neighbor, fall at the feet of politicians, love every law (except those that protect national security or the native population), cry about the unfairness of life, and destroy the institutions of liberty.

"Inequality and Excess." By Arnold Kling, TCS Daily, 4/7/08.