Illustration by DonkeyHotey for The Politics Blog (Based on Images from the AP)

owned for photo-op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, occasionally stretches himself out on one of the wide windowsills of the Young Fogies Club and, licking his balls contemplatively, watches all the ordinary people below as they hustle themselves through their workaday lives. These moments give him great peace. Moral Hazard believes that they connect him more closely to the world outside the Club, where the atmosphere was as close and as stuffy as were most of the members, many of whom took it upon themselves as their life's work to criticize those faceless masses down on the sidewalk. For their own good, of course. Always for their own good.

Moral Hazard sighed. Master had delivered himself of another lesson that morning. He had once again sought to teach the teeming throng how exactly their unreasonable demands upon their country had worked to damage its delicate essence, of which Master long had thought himself the curator. He'd even built a tiny, padded room in the new Cleveland Park family manse in which to store the country's delicate essence far away from the people of the country, who might drop it again in their desire to improve themselves in ways of which Master did not approve. Standards of behavior in Cleveland Park were firm but fair. Moral Hazard looked out the window again and sighed.

There was a newspaper stand just below the window. Moral Hazard saw the little Greek man who ran it ducking in and out behind the counter as people walked up to buy various things to read. One guy walked up in a very nice suit, some starshiney shoes, and a Louis Vuitton briefcase that the guy could use as a mirror, if he needed to do so. Moral Hazard had him pegged for a Times reader. He wondered if the guy would take Master's explanation of why everything that was wrong about the country was the fault of everybody else in the country in the spirit in which it was intended. Moral Hazard watched as the guy in the expensive suit leaned over the counter and bought a copy of Juggs. Moral Hazard was oddly reassured by this. It'd be nice to belong to that guy, he thought. Yeah, that'd be cool.

The people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States had a low but pretty accurate view of human nature. They knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing. They knew that people generally prize short-term goodies over long-term prosperity. So, in centuries past, the democratic pioneers built a series of checks to make sure their nations wouldn't be ruined by their own frailties.

And none of them — well, maybe Jefferson, when he was slumming — envisioned a nation in which people were fking on their sofas without the permission of the residents association of Cleveland Park.

The American founders did this by decentralizing power. They built checks and balances to frustrate and detain the popular will. They also dispersed power to encourage active citizenship, hoping that as people became more involved in local government, they would develop a sense of restraint and responsibility.

They also limited suffrage, which people are trying to do today. They also distrusted concentration of economic power as much as they distrusted the popular will. They fought for nearly 80 years over the concept of the national bank, a fight which Ron Paul has continued to this day. Your point is? I still think he's talking about people fking on their sofas.

Though the forms were different, the democracies in Europe and the United States were based on a similar carefully balanced view of human nature: People are naturally selfish and need watching. But democratic self-government is possible because we're smart enough to design structures to police that selfishness.

The Constitution is not a sociology experiment. It's a plan of government. It wasn't built to restrain "selfishness." It was built to restrain power, of all kinds, over the rights of a self-governing people. It wasn't meant to restrain them. It was meant to restrain their government.

But, over the years, this balanced wisdom was lost. Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims. Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives. Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right.

I'm not an expert, but, in their political manifestation, I'm thinking that what the people most want is to rid ourselves of the rigged game our alleged democracy has become. If our leaders really "anticipated and responded to the popular whims," we'd have a single-payer health-care system, some bankers in the hoosegow, and only David Brooks and Pete Peterson would care about The Deficit. And, again, wasn't it only 15 years ago that this same guy was arguing that indulging our every consumerist whim was the best statement we all could all make as self-governing citizens? Confused, I am, on my patio, with my new charcoal grill.

Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements.

See above. See also, how're those "vast spaces for entertainment" in the new mansion working out?

The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint.

It is not gridlocked because it is trying to impose self-restraint. It is gridlocked because one party wants to shove even more of the national wealth upwards, in a perfect demonstration of the political and economic policies you championed ever since you were a young fopdoodle riding Reagan's vapor trail. Some people think this is not a good thing for the country.

The Obama campaign issues its famous "Julia" ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle.

Yes, because things like small-business loans and student aid soften us and make us less attentive as citizens. Economic security is important to political democracy only for those people who can afford to live in Cleveland Park, and the people who pay their honoraria to tell them how virtuous are the people who ask so little of the government because they own most of it anyway.

In Europe, workers across the Continent want great lifestyles without long work hours. They want dynamic capitalism but also personal security. European welfare states go broke trying to deliver these impossibilities.

"Dynamic capitalism," in its current form, was pretty much forced on us all by a bunch of bought-and-paid for politicians in the service of crooks and mountebanks. You know what dynamic capitalism is? Dynamic capitalism is what built the middle class in this country, with the invaluable assistance of government programs like land-grant colleges and the GI Bill. There is nothing "dynamic" about the capitalism as it was practiced by the people who cratered the world, unless you think bleeding people with leeches is "dynamic" hematology. Also, David Brooks wouldn't last 15 minutes as, say, an Italian fisherman, or a bootblack in Marseilles.

Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.

Does this person, with his vast spaces for entertainment, honestly believe that the people who depend on things like Medicaid and Social Security, and small-business loans and Pell grants, are emboldened by the circumstances of their lives? Does he believe that these people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and only asking that the system be a little bit more fair are actually as smug and entitled as every syllable he's ever written proclaims Brooks to be? All over America, people are absolutely petrified that somebody in their family might get sick, thereby bankrupting them forever. All over America, people are worried that their mortgages are laden with small-print land mines. All over America, people are living in sheer abject terror that the job will disappear, or the rest of their 401K will go up in smoke, or grandma's Alzheimer's will offer them the choice of eating government cheese or letting the old girl die in her own filth in some unregulated nursing home. These are the people that David Brooks believes are destroying the country because their unreasoning hubris prevents government from making their lives even more difficult. I'm fking done with this nonsense. The man should be pelted with rotting fish.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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