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There is a real tension between the way these young Americans live and the public policies
of the Obama Administration. The public policies of the Obama Administration are mid-century
welfare state. You treat everybody as an interchangeable cog in a very large machine, as an interchangeable
part on an assembly line. You treat everybody the same, everybody’s got to go to the same
healthcare plan, everybody’s got to go to the same this and that, you have to have the
same insurance and so forth and so on. If you make any extra money we’ll take it away
from you and give it to other people because everybody’s got to be the same.
They live in a 20th-Century lifestyle. They have their own iPod playlists, they have their
own computers, they have their own Facebook pages. They want to make up their own worlds.
They want a world in which their individual character is something they can thrust forward
into the world and go along with. I think there is a case that can be made on
the part of people who believe in liberty and free-enterprise market economics that
the kind of growth and prosperity you get from our policies, as opposed to the stagnation
and sluggishness that you’ve gotten from the Obama Democrats’ big expansion of the
size and scope of the federal government, that our policies produce the kind of bounteous
economic growth and prosperity that gives you an opportunity to choose your own world,
to shape your own world, to find a way that you can make your living, that you can contribute
to your community, in a way that maximizes your own unique special abilities and talents
and interests and abilities and things you really care about.
Are we really a nation that wants big government? Did economic distress move Americans to be
more amenable to or supportive of big government? My answer is that the answer to those questions
pretty clearly “no.”