That sort of potluck wouldn’t turn out well.  Those that made the effort to prepare a dish for friends would see the 5 who came empty handed as moochers.  Glenn Reynolds’ Sunday Washington Examiner column uses the potluck dinner as a metaphor of what the country is becoming.

In today’s America, government benefits flow to large numbers of people who are encouraged to vote for politicians who’ll keep them coming.  The benefits are paid for by other people who, being less numerous, can’t muster enough votes to put this to a stop.

Over time, this causes the economy to do worse, pushing more people into the moocher class and further strengthening the politicians whose position depends on robbing Peter to pay Paul.  Because, as they say, if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can be pretty sure of getting Paul’s vote.

Peter is starting to feel like a sucker and Paul is getting militant in his demands for more of  what Peter produces.  The ant and the grasshopper fable is becoming reality.  The social divide is not between rich an poor but between the Peters and the Pauls, the makers versus the takers.  Call it the sucker-moocher divide.

Obama’s crony capitalism has perverted the incentives of the free market so that it makes sense for business to invest in lobbying government rather than improving their products and satisfying their customers.  An investment of a million dollars in lobbyists can provide big returns in government subsidies far in excess of what can be made on the same investment in the free market.  If we don’t like the product a corporation produces we don’t have to buy it.  But we don’t get to make that choice when a corporation sustains itself with a government handout.  Then we’re the suckers forced to pick up the tab.

The root of the problem is government has gotten too big, and the solution is to make the government smaller.  Glenn Reynolds ends his column this way,

When the crisis comes, and it will, we should relearn the lesson that the Framers of our Constitution knew and tried to embody: The bigger and more powerful the national government is, the more prone it is to corruption and interest-group domination.

A federal government that actually operated within the limits intended by the Framers would be much smaller, much less capable of creating economic distortion, and much less attractive to moochers and the politicians they enable. The bigger the pot of honey, the more flies it attracts.

Undoing what Richard Epstein calls “the mistakes of 1937,” in which most of those limits on federal power were removed by the Supreme Court, would go far toward fixing the problem.

That, of course, would require a Supreme Court with a more traditional view of the Constitution’s limits on federal power. Which would require a president interested in appointing justices with such views.

Something to keep in mind, between now and November.

Read the whole thing.