OK, one day you need some bread so you go to the store…

I walk into your house, right into the kitchen, when you weren’t home. I opened all the cupboards and moved the dinner dishes from one cupboard and put them in the pantry next to the breakfast cereal boxes, I moved the water glasses into the refrigerator, I moved the stuff from the junk drawer (c’mon, I know you have one…or two) from the kitchen and put it all in the glove box of your car, and on and on until I had the house organized exactly the way I wanted…regardless what you thought or how you did it before. I based my organization of your house on several studies done by esteemed researchers who had carried out experiments in universities.

Then I went away.

You get home and blow a gasket, “WTF!!!” you scream and you start putting things back in the places where their use was convenient, at least to your eyes and to you using them. Water glasses next to the sink makes sense, why the hell they were in the fridge is beyond you. You continue along your merry way making the house—your house—the way that you want it to be, the way it suits your purposes.

The next day I stop by

I immediately see that everything is different from where I put it before. I walk up to you with a gun in my hand and demand that you give me all of the money in your wallet AND that you put everything back the way that I had it, the way that the researchers said it should be. You refuse to do so citing the fact that it’s your house, it’s your private property, that nothing you do can be construed to be detrimental to any other person.

At gunpoint I lock you in the hall closet.

The next day I have a someone come in and feed you every day and watch you for the 20 minutes a day when you’re allowed to go to the bathroom but are then escorted directly back to your closet. Eventually I confiscate your house and all the property in it because you haven’t paid me for the cost of feeding you and I give it to a third party who sell it to someone else.

I move you to another house and another closet.

The person who now lives in your house one day goes to the store for some bread…

Welcome to America, entitlement programs and the taxes you pay to run those programs)