Some years ago Mark Steyn deplored the fate of Britain’s Susan Moore, who obtained notoriety for having vegetated on the dole ever since dropping out of college in the late Eighties. Steyn found it hard to think of anything “capitalism red in tooth and claw” could have done to Miss Moore “that would have left her worse off than the great sapping nullity in which Her Majesty’s Government has maintained her for her entire adult life.”
Miss Moore was at once a beneficiary and a casualty of what William Voegeli calls the “politics of kindness.” The particular distinction of this politics is that it is not kind. It did Miss Moore no real good to languish for decades as a pensioner of the state. It does a woman past childbearing no real good to be forced to purchase maternity insurance. It does Mother Earth herself no real good that tens of millions of us should each week pick through the household rubbish in obedience to municipal edicts — or so John Tierney contended in his 1996 New York Times Magazine article “Recycling Is Garbage,” an exposé of a practice that he said “may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”
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