America Goes Dark

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/op...rugman.html?hp

I particularly like the following paragraphs, but please read the whole of this thought provokiing essay.

" How did we get to this point? Its the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has
convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector cant do anything right. The antigovernment
campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud --- to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now the campaign has reached frution, we're seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooking for the public as a whole. So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we've taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere".