Every day that passes brings further evidence, in the marvelous phrase of Bill Kauffman in Chronicles, of “the enormous gulf between those who live in America and those who run it.” We who live in America are firmly convinced that we are taxed far too much, that government spending and taxation are eating out our substance to support a growing parasitic army of crooks and moochers, and that the accelerating burden of government has caused our economy to stagnate over the last two decades.

Modern liberalism works in a simple but effective manner: liberals Find Problems. This is not a difficult task, considering that the world abounds with problems waiting to be discovered. At the heart of these problems is the fact that we do not live in the Garden of Eden: that there is a scarcity of resources available for us to achieve all of our desired goals.

One of the most controversial aspects (because it involves scores of billions of dollars) of the Reagan administration’s tax “reform” plan is its proposal to eliminate the deductibility of state and local taxes from the federal income tax. The argument rests on the view that, under deductibility, the citizens of the low-tax states are “subsidizing” the high-tax states.

The big bad gasoline tax, one of the favorite programs of left-liberalism, is back in the limelight. After having denounced the scheme during the campaign as a tax on the middle class, then President-elect Clinton professed surprise that so many luminaries at the interregnum “economic summit” championed the idea.

There is no question that the media darling of the early 1988 presidential election season was former governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona. As time neared for the Iowa caucuses, pundits for virtually every organ of the Establishment media weighed in with serioso think-pieces about the glory and the wonder, the intelligence and especially the high courage of a great man who suffered the misfortune of looking like Ichabod Crane on television.

Hosannas poured in from all parts of the academic spectrum—left, right, and center—hailing the Treasury’s 1986 draft plan as an approach to the ideal of the “flat tax.” (Since the plan calls for three classes of income tax rates, it has been called a “flat tax with bumps.”)

Riots in the streets; protest against a hated government; cops arresting protesters. A familiar story these days. But suddenly we find that the protests are directed, not against a hated Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe, but against Mrs. Thatcher’s regime in Britain, a supposed paragon of liberty and the free market. What’s going on here? Are anti-government demonstrators heroic freedom-fighters in Eastern Europe, but only crazed anarchists and alienated punks in the West?

Mrs. Thatcher’s departure from British rule befitted her entire reign: blustering in rhetoric (“the Iron Lady will never quit”) accompanied by very little concrete action (as the Iron Lady quickly departed).

In politics fall, not spring, is the silly season. How many times have we seen the farce: the crisis deadline in October, the budget “summit” between the Executive and Congress, and the piteous wails of liberals and centrists that those wonderful, hard-working, dedicated “federal workers” may be “furloughed,” which unfortunately does not mean that they are thrown on the beach to find their way in the productive private sector.