That's government by the smart. The good news is that it doesn't seem to be
selling. According to a recent poll, 57% of Americans believe government is
doing things that should be left to business and individuals. Not only do most
Americans object, Gallup says the opposition is the "highest such reading in
more than a decade."

But now that subsidy is coming in to be clipped. This fall congressional
staff, looking for a new revenue source to pay for health reform, proposed
eliminating the tax deductibility of the subsidy to employers. The supposed
savings were estimated by congressional staff to be as much as $5 billion over
the next decade.

The tragic irony of this year is that Democrats are rushing the U.S. down
this same primrose entitlement path. With ObamaCare certain to eat up several
more percentage points of GDP as it inevitably expands, we will take a giant
step toward European social priorities.

For many Democrats, this is precisely the goal. Many Europeans, such as those
at the Financial Times, will also welcome America's relative decline. But we
doubt the American people fully understand what such a gilded entitlement cage
means for our national vitality, or for our ability to defend U.S. interests at
home and abroad.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even
as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been
flat since the 1970s.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class
has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to
serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to
middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to
creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars
annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the
fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

Pundits talk about "populist rage" as a way to trivialize the anger and fear
coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand
with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same
rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is "too
big to fail." They recognize that business models have shifted and that big
banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They
understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving
consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.