Commentary
A couple of months ago, I wrote about various ways that both existing policies and proposed policies hurt a certain number of American citizens. Sometimes the hurt was by design; other times, an unavoidable consequence of the policy.
Question: Are government policies that make citizens worse off justifiable? Is it naïve to hope for a government that has, as one of its central tenets, a principle such as the physicians’ “first do no harm”? (Hippocrates authored the phrase, although in a work called “From the Epidemics,” not as part of the Hippocratic oath, as is widely believed).
I suspect a majority would tell me I’m dreaming if I think there can be a government that operates on the basis of refraining from imposing some pain, some hardship, on its citizens, but the historical fact is that there has been such a government. It was the U.S. government in the early decades of our Republic….