LEARNING TO LOVE your “Federal Family.”

UPDATE: Reader John S. Ford writes:

Why not have the feds be more specific about who my “Federal Family” really is and just call them my “Big Brother”? I’m just saying…

More like your drunken profligate brother-in-law who’s always hitting you up for a loan. Meanwhile, reader Bill Hesson emails:

All this creepy “federal family” business reminds me of an important insight from Hayek. Is it too much to believe that the destruction of our macro-cosmos is this Administration’s intent?

“If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once.”

The Fatal Conceit, F.A. Hayek

It’s funny how people who don’t like talk of “family values” as applied to actual families like the idea when it comes to describing the public sphere.