One of Adam Smith’s most famous quotations involves the butcher, brewer, and baker acting in their self-interest to provide us our meals.

Writing for Human Events, John Hayward revives this notion of pursuing self-interest “rightly understood.”

There is no longer the slightest pretense of treating government as a dreadful expense to be shouldered by a consenting populace as evenly as possible, to perform a few carefully limited duties. Now you’re supposed to wait for Good King Barack to smile upon your small-business plan and direct one of his many courtiers to cut you a check. Applause for his good intentions is expected, while questions about the grim outcomes are rude, and limits to his discretion are unthinkable.

It’s long past time for Americans to grow up and move past this childish and destructive fantasy. The great majority of people act in the interests of themselves, and their families. They work hard to get ahead. They make investments in the pursuit of reward. The Democrats have no trouble understanding and promoting this when they’re looking to buy votes at $700 a pop… but otherwise, they expect us to embrace the highly regimented altruism of limitless “donations” to an angelic government filled with thousands of wise and selfless bureaucrats, whose salaries we are not supposed to envy.

Politics is the worst way to fulfill your self-interest. It’s compulsive, which means it’s destructive. Wealth is quickly shredded in a crossfire of votes from competing interests, seeking to force one another to pay for benefits. The only thing “progressive” about those politics is that they become progressively uglier. The Social Security system Obama is raiding to toss out his little payroll tax bouquets has already gone into the red. Very soon, it will be completely unable to continue, even with those incessant tweaks to the retirement age. When that happens, we will all receive a very unpleasant lesson in what “bitter clinging” looks like.

A system in which the natural ambitions of free people are thwarted, and punished, is an immoral system doomed to failure. When cash from the government is viewed as magical charity, while the desire to keep the money you actually earned is portrayed as despicable greed, madness is the inevitable result.