Sometimes people will write to me complaining that the government, specifically the Social Security Administration, has messed them up and cheated them out of benefits they might have been due. But many times, the fault (to trivialize a famous line from Shakespeare’s play, “Julius Caesar”) is not in our government, but in ourselves. Here are…

Most mornings, I sit down at my computer and open my emails. I find many of the same questions I’ve answered hundreds, if not thousands of times over the 25 years I’ve been writing this column. And even though it’s “deja vu all over again,” I don’t mind answering those questions because I know that…