The Government Wants To Help You

In A.N. Wilson's book The Victorians, he points to an important difference between a prudent and sensible government (whether conservative or liberal) and the whining, interfering nanny state supported by today's prissy leftwingers. A government which tries to improve the quality of things like pavements and roads and parks and tapwater and drains and beaches and public libraries and facilities in schools may occasionally be thanked for its efforts; but a government whose odious and tiresome mission it is to improve the people themselves (or to try and "protect" the people from themselves) will receive at the least irritation and ingratitude and at the most abuse and contempt.

And so it should be.