I agree with Deacon that

I agree with Deacon that the platitude that liberals think “people are basically good,” which we all learned in our college government courses, is out of date. Maybe it was true once, I’m not sure. But today, liberals believe (and, worse yet, hope) that people have no higher aspirations than to suck what they can out of a common pot in hopes of attaining security–“security” in the contemptible sense that assumes someone else is looking out for both the common defense and the economic production that supports us all. In today’s world, it is only conservatism that assumes people are capable of pursuing a more noble course than scrapping for a slightly bigger piece of the pie that someone else baked. For just one of countless examples, see the WSJ article by David Asman that the Trunk linked to earlier today.