Jeffrey Toobin has a profile of Elizabeth Warren in the current New Yorker magazine, dated September 17, 2012. The first two paragraphs set the scene: It's last summer and a house party is overflowing as Elizabeth Warren tests support for her run against Scott Brown for United States Senator from Massachusetts.
Toobin's third paragraph brought me up short:
At one point, someone asked Warren if she was engaging in class warfare. "No," she said. "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate." For decades, American politicians, including many Democrats, had celebrated private enterprise and offered only tepid, almost apologetic endorsements of public goods. Here, in contrast, was Warren's rousing defense of the welfare state.
Really?
Public streets and roads? Public schools? That's what we mean now by the
welfare state?
If you have the means, please contribute to Elizabeth Warren's campaign. The alternative vision of the future is too much like a very grim page in a Charles Dickens' novel.