April 5, 2011 9:16AM

Paul Ryan and Political Discipline

By Roger Pilon

Paul Ryan's budget -- hard-headed fiscal sanity or inhumane?

My response:

Either we discipline ourselves, painfully, or soon enough the Chinese and other lenders will do it for us, more painfully still, by refusing to loan to us any longer at currently low interest rates. And in that event, the debt service will be all consuming. Neither individuals nor nations can go down the road we're on without paying the price.

Margaret Thatcher put it plainly: "The trouble with socialism" -- let's be honest, we're socializing the costs of our appetites by imposing them on our children and grandchildren -- "is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Inhumane? The inhumanity is among those demagogues who put us on this path, promising something for nothing year in and year out. Paul Ryan deserves our gratitude for biting the bullet at last. The ball is now in the court of the demagogues.

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