[Urbane Guerrilla]

Like trying to turn federal Social Security into everybody's pension plan rather than the more limited original idea of an emergency net. Private retirement plans do keep you a lot richer, do they not?

The Left's fundamental move is to turn the central government into the provider of services, and the services into "rights," but "rights" granted by government fiat. Thus the leftist/progressive vision of the government as the Great Provider is realized. And the economic inefficiency of tax levying to finance all this is, well, not realized by most of the perpetrators. This is the process of government "entitlements" programs, and they are the one thing that unbalances the federal budget.

This is socialism in all its, uh, drab glory, and now the world is coming to an understanding that it doesn't work so well. A society that tries to subsume the private sector in the public sector ends up less efficient at creating wealth, and only succeeding in the one alternative: organizing (a) scarcity (pick your scarcity if you like).

You have this pretty much shot through all of American history since the Depression, and particularly prevalent since the Great Society programs -- LBJ had his pluses but I'm not sure this extension of socialistic policies was one of them. That you were moved to ask suggests you've not read modern American history with this in mind. Try it and see if a new light dawns.

The simple explanation for currency inflation -- its debasement, gradually and over time -- is that it is caused by lengthy government deficit spending. Entitlement programs are just another way to indulge in the likeliest way for democracies to risk collapse: the electorate voting itself the treasury, in whole or in part. Add deficits, and watch the mischief be compounded.

Had the Right been uniformly successful at "imposing their morals, [not] allowing each individual..." would American law look as it does today -- or would it look like something very different from now?