The Government Can't—and Won't—Give Meaning to Your Life

[EasyAce]

A conservative technocrat tries to engineer a better world.
By Peter Suderman
http://reason.com/archives/2019/02/04/the-problem-of-purpose

. . . In his new book, The Once and Future Worker, Oren Cass, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and a former policy adviser on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, offers a slew of policy proposals, from loosening environmental regulations to reshaping collective bargaining to overhauling the process by which the federal government funds state-based poverty programs to creating new wage subsidies for low-income workers. Each of these ideas is an attempt to address a little problem, all of which add up to a much bigger problem . . .

. . . [Cass] is actually trying to solve something much bigger: the problem of purpose. "Most of the activities and achievements that give life purpose and meaning are, whether in the economic sphere or not, fundamentally acts of production," he writes. His ultimate aim, then, is to restore—or provide—a sense of meaning to American life, particularly to factory workers who lack advanced education.

The goal is noble, ambitious, and impossible. Cass, the policy wonk and campaign adviser, wants to solve this big problem the same way he wants to solve all the little problems: by carefully pulling the levers of public policy. It reflects a profound and fundamental misunderstanding of what politics can do and what it is for . . .

[ABX]

Sorry, we are way past that now. Politics is now the religion of both the left and the right, with people obsessing over it more than they do their traditional faith. No longer do people view the government with skepticism and want to keep it in check- they now see it as their savior to every problem.

Give in to Big Brother. Accept Big Brother into your heart. Wear Big Brother's attire and change his slogans.