Are Free Markets from Outer Space?

One of the first casualties of increasing partisanship in American politics (and we are seeing it in San Jose politics, too) is the lost art of compromise, as factions demand more and more from a tax base that struggles to meet liabilities from years past.

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal writes on 6.6.2019:

"Across the half century after World War II, governments of the left and right compromised their way to building and expanding vast networks of programmed public dependency (and constituencies) that have reached their financial carrying capacity. There aren't enough young people to fund the promised payment inside these demographic time bombs.

"The debate now over socialism versus capitalism conceals the cruder reality that the parties of the left--whether in the U.S., U.K., Germany, or the nation-state of California--have come to regard the private sector as an alien tribe whose only function is to finance the public machinery that runs welfare, health, and now climate protocols."