Most problems do not get solved. They get superseded by other concerns. - Thomas Sowell

Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.

"A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence — often the sole evidence offered — of "inadequate" nongovernment institutions, whose "inability" to cope with problems "obviously" required state intervention. Government is depicted as acting not in response to its own political incentives and constraints but because it is compelled to do so by concern for the public interest: it "cannot keep its hands off" when so "much is at stake," when emergency "compels" it to supersede other decision making processes. Such a tableau simple ignores the possibility that there are political incentives for the production and distribution of "emergencies" to justify expansions of power as well as to use episodic emergencies as a reason for creating enduring government institutions."

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.