Steven Greenhut on How Big Government Undermines Freedom and Prosperity

During the early days of the labor movement, the hard leftists never made much headway because of that deep-seated idea that, no matter how humble one's beginnings, an American can make it big some day. But something has changed, writes Steven Greenhut, even as our society has become wealthier. Somewhere we've shifted from honoring success to envying it, from viewing government as a limited tool to achieve a few necessary things (infrastructure, enforcing the rule of law) to seeing it as the be-all and end-all of our society.