What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. At the high price of kerosene at that time, an ordinary working man could not afford to stay up at night, burning this expensive fuel for hours at a time.

Rockefeller did not begin his life as rich, by any means. He made a fortune by revolutionizing the petroleum industry. Although we still measure petroleum in barrels, it is actually shipped in railroad tank cars, in ocean-going tankers and in tanker trucks.

That is a legacy of John D. Rockefeller, who saw that shipping oil in barrels was not as economical as shipping whole railroad tank cars full of oil, eliminating all the labor that had to go into shipping the same amount of oil in numerous individual barrels.

That was just one of his cost-cutting innovations. If there was a better way to extract, process and ship petroleum products– or more products that could be made from petroleum– Rockefeller was on top of it.

Before he came along, gasoline was considered a useless by-product that petroleum refineries often simply dumped into the nearest river. But Rockefeller decided to use it as a fuel in the refining process, which made it valuable, even before automobiles came along.

Today, we tend to think of John D. Rockefeller as just one of those famous rich people. But Rockefeller didn’t just “happen to have money.” How he got rich is the real story– and it is a story whose implications reach far beyond that one particular individual.

Before Rockefeller’s innovations reduced the price of kerosene to a fraction of what it had once been, there wasn’t a lot for poor people to do when nightfall came, other than go to bed. But the advent of cheap kerosene added hours of light and activity to each day for people with low or moderate incomes.

It was much the same story with the advent of the automobile, which gave millions of people more range in space, as kerosene (and, later, electricity) gave them more range in terms of hours of daily activity.

Here again, automobiles and electric lights were truly luxuries of the rich when they began. Only after ways were developed to cut their costs drastically were such things brought within the reach of ordinary Americans.

Henry Ford’s mass production methods cut in half the cost of producing the famous Model T Ford in just five years. People who had once lived their entire lives within a narrow radius of a relatively few miles could now go see places they never knew about before. The automobile expanded their horizons.

People today who complain about the automobile’s pollution have no idea how much more pollution there was before the automobile came along. In New York City, for example, the 40,000 horses that were the backbone of the city’s transportation, before the automobile, produced 400 tons of manure per working day, along with 20,000 gallons of urine.

At one time, people like Rockefeller, Edison, Ford and the Wright brothers were regarded as heroes, for having opened vast new possibilities for other human beings. The fact that they got rich doing it was an incidental part of the story.

We still have people revolutionizing our lives. Just think of the computer and the pharmaceutical drugs that have not only lengthened our lives but made them more healthful, so that being 80 years old today is like being 60 years old in times past.

But today we seldom even know the names of those who have made these monumental contributions to human well-being. All we know is that some people have gotten “rich” and that this is to be regarded as some sort of grievance.

Many of the people we honor today are people who are skilled in the rhetoric of grievances and promises of new “rights” at someone else’s expense. But is that what is going to make a better America?

Liberalism’s decline might appear, at first glance, to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy—when historians noted the first glimmerings of what was to become liberalism’s distinctive trait, overreach. Kennedy’s soaring oratory was infectious and admirable and even impressed a later generation of conservatives. But it was a bit dishonest. There never was a missile gap with the Soviet Union, as he claimed, or any other cause for histrionics. On the domestic side, the oratory set in motion President Lyndon Johnson’s catastrophic War on Poverty.

JFK’s stirring language represented a break with the Burkean understanding of President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, whether he articulated it or not, wanted to put the Great Depression and the dangerous confrontations of the early Cold War period behind us. He wanted to return to normalcy. Yet Kennedy’s inaugural put America on a different path, one that led to the Cuban missile crisis and ultimately to Vietnam. It fixed America’s stance in the world, and with that stance we were on the road to Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestically it set us on the path to a behemoth big government.

Still, in tracing liberalism’s decline, one cannot ignore an earlier event: the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II. The conflict pitted what we might call the radicals led by Henry Wallace against the advocates of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would call in his book, “The Vital Center,” more practical liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph L. Rauh and Walter Reuther. They were hard-headed and patriotic, and their desiderata were reasonable by comparison with the radicals’ utopian ideas about the Soviet Union.

The practical liberals won in the late 1940s, but in 1972 civil war broke out anew. This time the radicals won. In the meantime, LBJ’s Great Society caused even some liberals to warn against the “unintended consequences” of government programs. These were to be the first new recruits to modern conservatism. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and, for a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were in Kristol’s words liberals “who were mugged by reality.” The radicals were seeking refuge from reality in a self-regarding fantasy. Only a crisis in the leadership of President Richard Nixon, Watergate, allowed them to hide from the American electorate their fantastic delusions.

Conservatives have had Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures. Sometimes they have provided discipline; sometimes conservatives have followed their own star. The problem for liberals is they have been denied a cynosure. Some had looked to the British Fabian Socialists and some to Karl Marx, but since the late 1940s liberals became coy about their intellectual mentors.

From the Nixon administration on, the numbers have not been good for liberals. In 1972 only one state went for presidential candidate George McGovern, who even lost the youth vote. In 1976 liberalism did better, but Jimmy Carter ran as a moderate.

Then came 1980. Ronald Reagan benefitted from the ongoing electoral accretions that modern conservatism has attracted: the neocons, the evangelicals (aka the Christian Right), the Reagan Democrats. Liberals could claim nothing new.

During his eight years in office, Reagan changed the political center for years to come. As the Old Cowboy headed back to California, the political center was center-right: vigilance about big government, balanced budgets, low taxes and peace through strength.

In 1992, after 12 years of conservatives in the White House, Bill Clinton beat George Herbert Walker Bush. Yet he too ran as a moderate. Once in office he tried to push a big government agenda and was trounced in the midterm election.

The rest of Clinton’s presidency was defined by his pronouncement that “The era of big government is over.” The Reagan revolution was secured. In 2000, Clinton’s vice president lost to the governor of Texas despite prosperity and peace. George W. Bush won the midterms in 2002. Then came the Republicans’ wilderness years in 2006 and 2008—but not conservatism’s. Conservatives remained more popular than liberals by about a 2-1 margin.

Conservatism has steadily spread through the country since its larval days in the 1950s, and the reason is that the vast majority of Americans favor free enterprise and personal liberty. Note the tea party movement. The Republicans just took the House of Representatives by over 60 seats and gained six seats in the Senate. The social democrat in the White House has been routed.

Over the past two years the Democrats showed their true colors. Faced with an entitlement crisis, they rang up trillion dollar deficits. We now face an entitlement crisis and a budget crisis—and liberals have no answer for it beyond tax and spend. They still have support in the media, but even here they are faced with opposition from Fox News, talk radio and the Internet.

As a political movement liberalism is dead. They do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies. They have 23 seats in the Senate to defend in 2012 (against the Republicans’ 10) and Republican control of state houses and legislatures will give them even more seats in the future. Liberalism R.I.P.

Barack Obama had barely settled in office when he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Though he’s been in the job fewer than 18 months, liberal scholars are already rating him one of our better presidents, finishing ahead of even Ronald Reagan on 20 attributes ranging from legislative accomplishments to integrity.

In a Siena College poll of 238 presidential scholars, Mr. Obama emerges as the 15th most highly rated president, trailing Bill Clinton (13th place) but finishing three spots above Reagan (18th place). Mr. Obama’s immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, was ranked number 39th among 42 presidents, and bested only Warren Harding in one category, intelligence.

Siena poll director Douglas Lonnstrom notes that Obama scored highest in the categories of imagination (6th), communication (7th) and intelligence (8th). His only poor rating was “background,” where he placed 32nd, perhaps because of his relative inexperience before taking office.

If the Siena Poll proves anything, however, it’s the folly of trusting “presidential scholars” to make objective judgments about presidents. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal published its own book, edited by James Taranto, exploring what makes American presidents great or groan-inducing. Mr. Taranto said at the time the book was needed because most surveys “reflect the left-wing bias of academia, and thus tend to give conspicuously low ratings to conservative presidents.”

The Journal’s survey polled an ideologically balanced group of 85 historians, political scientists, law professors and economists, whose range of political views was similar to that of Americans as a whole. The results? Three presidents were ranked as “great”: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Eight presidents were ranked “near great,” including Ronald Reagan, who finished eighth. John F. Kennedy was ranked 18th and Lyndon Johnson was ranked 17th, and those were the only high points for recent presidents.

Obviously, the 2005 Journal survey didn’t rate Mr. Obama. But given the direction of the economy since he took office, a conspicuous absence of foreign policy successes and his falling public approval ratings, it’s doubtful that his preliminary grade among Journal scholars would be nearly as high as the respondents in the Siena poll.

by Charles Krauthammer

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), “travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.” In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton’s incredulity at America’s abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.

Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama’s Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy’s enthusiasm for human space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we’d landed on the moon. Then five more landings, ten more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We’ve done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated — and ultimately, hopelessly impractical — machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the international space station, itself created in a fit of post–Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing “Kumbaya” while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile, and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going — like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde — into the Museum of Things Too Beautiful and Complicated to Survive.

America’s manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

So what, you say? Don’t we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we’d waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we’d still be living in caves.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one’s asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington — “stimulus” monies that, unlike Eisenhower’s interstate highway system or Kennedy’s Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness — to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

Why do it? It’s not for practicality. We didn’t go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” And when you do such magnificently hard things — send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong — you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages would create the most potent impetus to — and symbol of — environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?

Ironically, that new consciousness about the uniqueness and fragility of Earth focused contemporary imagination away from space and back to Earth. We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints — untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.

How could we?

by Myron Magnet

It’s worth recalling that when the Founding Fathers led the American colonists in revolt against British oppression, they weren’t rebelling against torture on the rack or being chained in galleys or having to let aristocrats deflower their daughters. They were rebelling against taxes. To them, having to pay duties they hadn’t voted for themselves was a tyrannical taking of property—theft—and, in true Lockean fashion, they concluded that since government exists to protect life, liberty, and property, a regime that does the opposite renders itself illegitimate. What would they make, then, of today’s New York City, where 1.2 percent of the taxpayers—40,000 households—pay 50 percent of the income taxes, and half the households pay no income tax at all? If the tax code ensures that those who pay the bulk of the taxes are always a minority of those who vote for the legislature that imposes the taxes, isn’t that taxation without representation? Isn’t it also the tyranny of the majority that the Founders tried to prevent?

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and President Franklin D. Roosevelt made New York the New Deal city.

A state of affairs so opposed to the Founders’ vision could never have come about all at once. It took shape in emergency spurts, sparked by upheavals like the Civil War, which prompted crisis measures like the first federal income tax (made legal retrospectively in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment). For New York, the cataclysmic turning point was the Depression. Gotham was the New Deal metropolis, with New York senator Robert F. Wagner and Gotham mayor Fiorello La Guardia falling over each other to make the city the showcase for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s big programs, designed (among other aims) to turn urban ethnics—whose normally supportive banks and charities the Depression had crushed along with their jobs—into the foundation of Democratic Party power.

As New York’s governor, FDR had already begun in 1931 to provide the state’s jobless with welfare proper—direct relief in money, food, and clothing—for the first time in over half a century. As president, he made the program national in 1933 through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and La Guardia quadrupled Washington’s funds with lavish state and city supplements. After the mayor heard that insolent city workers were worsening the already-painful humiliation of getting aid, he rushed down to a Lower East Side relief station to investigate. When he saw abashed applicants waiting and waiting, while an official in a hat lounged with his feet on a desk, smoking a cigar, La Guardia famously strode over to him, knocked the cigar out of his mouth and the hat off his head, and barked, “Take your hat off when you speak to a citizen!” Later he announced, “That’s another s. of a b. that has no job.” In 1935, the feds instituted another cash relief program, this one for fatherless families: Aid to Dependent Children, which was supporting 700,000 kids nationwide by 1939 and later became the main U.S. welfare scheme. In addition to such cash programs, FDR’s Public Works Administration put New Yorkers to work building the Triborough Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, and La Guardia Airport; by 1936, the Works Progress Administration had employed 250,000 Gothamites to construct, under the direction of La Guardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, public swimming pools, beaches, playgrounds, and hospitals.

La Guardia had set about constructing the first welfare city from the moment he entered City Hall. In his 1933 campaign, he had floated the unprecedented idea of government housing, and when he won, the White House offered to fund a New York City Housing Authority if the new mayor would set it up. On a frigid December 3, 1935, the nation’s first-ever public housing project opened on the Lower East Side. “A great constitutional lawyer two years ago told me it would be a cold day when the government builds houses,” said La Guardia at the dedication of the 122-unit complex, proudly highlighting the radicalism of his accomplishment. “Well, he was right that time.” Constitutional or not, eight more projects arose during La Guardia’s three terms in City Hall. In addition, with $315 million in bond financing, the mayor took over the city’s three ailing and deteriorating private subway companies, along with its bus lines, in 1939 and 1940, turning transportation into a government-subsidized public service and transit workers into civil servants. To accompany his publicly funded municipal hospitals, he also set in motion a subsidized health-insurance program, which began operating just before he died in 1947.

Taken together, all these programs not only expanded government unimaginably but also created a comprehensive new rationale for it, very different from the Founding Fathers’ political philosophy. Not content with ensuring the liberty in which individuals are free to pursue their own happiness in their own way, government was now going to hand it to them. “We are trying to make people happy,” La Guardia announced. “We are going to make our city a real heaven,” he promised, taking politics into a realm beyond the mere art of the possible.

A much subtler thinker, Roosevelt—in the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, as a modern Democrat would put it—calculatedly used the Depression as an occasion to remake society in accordance with his own vision of “social justice” and freedom, though his new birth of freedom stood Lincoln’s on its head. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he postulated. The great corporations and the tycoons who controlled them before the New Deal, he said, “had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us, life was no longer free; liberty was no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government.”

But while big government existed to protect the individual from big business, the individual paradoxically faded out in FDR’s worldview, changed in the president’s imagination into a unit in the great social machine. “For it is literally true that the ‘self-supporting’ man or woman has become as extinct as the man of the stone age,” he declared. “Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.” Moreover, the great social machine is better off without the rugged individuals of yore, since in Roosevelt’s conventional (and mistaken) economic theory, the Depression was a crisis of overproduction, with an excess of goods and services forcing down prices and wages. “The day of the great promoter or financial Titan, to whom we granted everything if only he would build, or develop, is over,” FDR pronounced. “Our task now is not discovery, or exploitation, of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, . . . of distributing wealth and products more equitably.” Progress was something that had already happened; in FDR’s view—before the war, at least—America had reached the end of history.

Once you start talking about government’s equitable distribution of wealth—about giving government the power to define and create “fairness,” as Hayek put it—you have begun to leave democracy behind. And while both FDR and La Guardia were extraordinary visionaries with sincere sympathy for ordinary people, theirs was not a democratic vision. Roosevelt’s patrician paternalism saw the world from an Olympian height, from which individuals, in the shadow of the immense, almost superhuman institutions that concerned him, looked tiny and indistinguishable. The scale of his imagination was much grander than the Founders’ vision of a government powerful enough to protect individuals from the depredations of others but strictly limited and hedged by checks and balances to keep it from becoming an instrument of oppression, as history shows most governments have been.

In the same vein, La Guardia bristled at being called a “politician,” preferring the honorific “municipal officer.” In true Progressive fashion, he dreamed of government by enlightened, public-spirited experts, as opposed to venal (but democratic) Tammany-style pols, and he kept trying to soar above politics, defining himself as a “progressive” rather than a “regular” Republican. He flitted from party to party, winning the mayoralty in 1933 as the Fusion candidate, in 1937 as the Fusion, Republican, Progressive, and American Labor Party candidate, and in 1941 as the Republican candidate endorsed by his best Democratic friend, FDR. “You know I am in the position of an artist or a sculptor,” he explained. “I can see New York as it should be and as it can be if we all work together”—if, in other words, the voters would give him the power to mold their world into the shape he desired for them. Any great leader needs a vision, of course—needs to show people the world as it could be. But it is not surprising that the five-foot-two dynamo’s enemies called him the “midget Mussolini” or that he kept on his desk a figurine of that other dynamo of short stature who tried to impose his gigantic will on the world, Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Founders recognized the danger of a freely elected government’s becoming what Declaration of Independence signer Richard Henry Lee called an “elective despotism.” In their urgency to combat the Depression with all possible weapons, the New Dealers discounted that peril.

As so often happens, the emergency measures didn’t disappear when the emergency ended. But they needed an updated rationale. They got one in August 1943, when, after Gotham’s wartime job opportunities and its rich smorgasbord of welfare benefits had drawn waves of new black migrants into the city, a white cop summoned to settle an unruly dispute shot an unarmed black soldier, and Harlem erupted in riots. Even sober working people joined in the arson and looting, smashing windows and carrying off merchandise “in bundles and baskets and parcels.” Six died; property damage totaled $15 million. Mayor La Guardia’s response was to turn all the machinery of the new welfare city to eradicating the racial inequality that, in his view, had sparked the riots—though a Brooklyn grand jury at that very moment recommended better policing as the solution to that borough’s African-American lawlessness. Roundly condemning the Brooklyn approach, the mayor gave the welfare city a new justification: creating racial justice. For the first time, though, with New Deal money no longer flowing, the cost of welfare put the city budget in deficit. La Guardia’s successors raised taxes by dribs and drabs, a hotel levy here, a sales-tax boost there.

La Guardia was ahead of his time, but over 20 years later, when John Lindsay took over city hall during President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Nelson Rockefeller’s long, liberal reign as New York’s governor, the nation had caught up. Redressing three centuries of racial wrongs became America’s Number One political crusade. As always, New York marched in the vanguard, with LBJ taking as his chief antipoverty model a Lower East Side far-left community-organizing group called Mobilization for Youth, which emphasized confrontational political activism to change “the system,” poverty’s supposed cause.

Lindsay himself—a “progressive” Republican like La Guardia, though without the genius—adopted a dumbed-down version of Marx’s already-crude idea that ideas and values are merely an automatic reflection of the economic “base.” So he set out to provide poor black New Yorkers with middle-class incomes, middle-class housing in middle-class neighborhoods, and middle-class political control of schooling as a way of making them middle-class citizens with a middle-class outlook. The result of such governmental largesse was exploding welfare dependency, anarchic housing projects, family collapse, and open warfare between activists and teachers whose destructive consequences proved ineradicable. As the welfare rolls shot up under radical social-services chief Mitchell “Come-and-Get-It” Ginsberg, and as businesses and middle-class taxpayers began fleeing the disorder, taxes shot up, too, and New York City imposed its first personal income tax during Lindsay’s first year in office, 1966.

But over the following decades—and despite all the War on Poverty foolishness that turned so many of its supposed beneficiaries into an intergenerational underclass—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, along with a transformation of white attitudes about race, really accomplished the civil rights revolution that the country desired, fully opening American opportunity to African-Americans. Much effort went into denying this accomplishment—from blacks whose identity rested on their sense of grievance, from unionized service providers and clients fearful of losing their incomes, from politicians and advocates staring into the dustbin of history. But with the election of an African-American as president, even many blacks who once resisted the idea are starting to imagine themselves as an equal part of the American nation.

A democracy can’t tax citizens without a rationale, however cockeyed, as much of the War on Poverty’s rationale was. That’s part of the reason for the outrage over the Bush-era congressional earmarks to build a bridge to nowhere or remove tattoos or combat obesity: giving legislators taxpayer money to disburse as they saw fit, with no stated national purpose, pulled the veil off the great taxation machine and revealed parts of it, at least, as a racket—as theft, the Founders would say. Now our polity stands at an inflection point. “New Deal II: The War on Poverty” is over, its mission accomplished, though by different means than it foresaw. What do we do with the government machinery it justified?

A strangely fortunate by-product of the War on Poverty’s focus on minorities was that it largely insulated white America from the most destructive and demoralizing welfare programs and attitudes that retarded progress among many of the black and Hispanic poor. It shunted the New Deal welfare state onto a branch line, while England and Europe hurtled down the welfare state’s main line to much more widespread dependency and idleness, low growth, limited horizons, little innovation, and a grossly bloated public sector, with countless unproductive government drones gobbling up a porcine share of GDP and further constricting liberty through meddling, “fairness”-promoting diktats.

But in New York, with its vast population of the hereditary minority poor, we now have something less like the rest of America and more like the European welfare state: heavily and inequitably taxed; undemocratic, unsustainable, and largely pointless; with government telling us what to eat and where to smoke, using its total control of the school system to accomplish little beyond boosting costs dramatically, subsidizing or dictating the rents on half of the city’s rental apartments, forcing private health-insurance buyers to subsidize the care of the indigent, and prohibiting us from asking whether those who use the services we pay for are here legally. Our public services, even vital ones like the subway, work badly, because they operate less for the convenience of their users than for the sake of their unionized, overpaid employees, now not so much public servants as the public’s masters, through the vast political might they wield over so powerful a government.

On top of which, New York State, judged the “least free” in the nation in a new George Mason University study of personal and economic liberty, is quicker than the other 49 states to wield eminent domain to take away private property and give it to someone else, the absurd extreme of government-forced redistribution. Such unfreedom—along with “swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”—would have driven the Founders to arms, but New Yorkers have no idea of how to reform a government that is essentially a one-party elective despotism with no checks and balances, and no democratic levers of change, such as voters’ initiatives and referenda. For us, the clearest solution is to leave, as millions of middle-class individuals and most of our Fortune 500 headquarters have done over the last half-century.

Struggling under the accumulated burden of eight decades of “progressive” government, we New Yorkers can serve as a warning to our fellow Americans as President Obama, following the New Deal playbook, seeks to use the current financial crisis to provide a new rationale and legitimacy for the gargantuan machinery of the federal government. Our economic ills, the president contends, require expanding the welfare state to include the majority of Americans not just in Medicare and Social Security but also in government-subsidized and -controlled health care and higher education—all paid for by an ever smaller percentage of the citizens, in the name of European-style redistributionist “fairness.” Logically, this plan is a non sequitur (in the process of turning, by constant repetition, into a Big Lie), since health care and education have nothing to do with the causes or cure of our present economic woes. But logic aside, consider New York’s government-controlled services and ask if they are worth taking to nationwide scale. Take a good look at the president’s tax plans, too, which will end up with many more Americans paying nothing and many fewer paying most of the bills. Once the tax eaters outnumber the taxpayers and can vote themselves an income, you have arrived at elective despotism.

And despotism is the real issue, much larger than high taxes and bad services provided by public employees whose pensions and lifetime health benefits dwarf those of most taxpayers who struggle to support them. Just look beyond European-style New York to Europe proper. In the name of “fairness,” European governments have criminalized free speech, with France prosecuting Brigitte Bardot, and Switzerland and Italy prosecuting Oriana Fallaci, for anti-Muslim statements, while the British home secretary who charged her husband’s porno movie rentals to the taxpayers has barred Dutch M.P. Geert Wilders and American talk-show host Michael Savage from Britain for fomenting anti-Islamic hatred. The Scandinavian countries have outlawed antihomosexual speech as well.

As Theodore Dalrymple has written in these pages, governments that take charge of life’s important matters—health care, pensions, the education of children—infantilize their citizens, making them so frivolous and torpid that they become unwilling even to defend their country and their way of life. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom,” Mark Steyn quotes one Dutchman saying ruefully about the Islamization of his country. “I was only good at enjoying it.” In this spirit, 15 British sailors surrendered without a shot to an Iranian gunboat in the Persian Gulf two years ago. “From the outset, it was very apparent that fighting back was simply not an option,” said a marine captain among these latter-day representatives of Lord Nelson’s indomitable tars. “Had we chosen to do so, then many of us would not be standing here today.” Such unblushing cowardice makes the Royal Navy, for all its costly weaponry, about as fearsome as the expensively armed Saudi or Egyptian air forces.

More important still, the propounders of the individualist work ethic, from Alexander Hamilton onward, had it right: a free society isn’t one that alleviates the burden of supporting ourselves and our families, but rather one that provides the opportunity to labor in a way that brings to light whatever human excellence may lie within us—a way that perhaps even adds to the sum of human progress. As opposed to FDR’s immense governmental machine throbbing mightily at the end of history, how much grander is Edmund Burke’s vision of society as “a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection.” It is a vision in which some can be the Titans Roosevelt rejected—not just the Morgans and the Vanderbilts that New York produced, but also its Edith Whartons and its Herman Melvilles. Most crucially, all can be humans, free citizens with a sense of purpose, not cogs.

Robert McNamara died on Monday at age 93 like he lived most of the latter half of his life, scorned and derided by his former liberal allies for refusing to turn against the Vietnam War as early as they did. As the New York Times put it in a page-one obituary headline, McNamara was the “Architect of Futile War.”

In historical fact, Vietnam was the liberals’ war, begun by JFK, escalated by LBJ, and cheered on for years by giants of the American left before they turned against it. In his 1995 memoir, McNamara apologized for the war. But he probably sealed his reputation on the left by also quoting the New York Times and liberal antiwar reporter David Halberstam for having opposed U.S. withdrawal as late as 1965. “To be fair to Halberstam,” McNamara wrote dryly, “the hawkish views he was expressing reflected the opinion of the majority of journalists at the time.”

Like JFK and Averell Harriman, Halberstam also supported the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a misguided foray into Vietnamese politics that led to deeper U.S. involvement. Only later as the war dragged on did these liberals lose their nerve, and they never forgave McNamara for fighting on — even years later after he finally agreed they were right.

As with Vietnam, American liberals also turned against the Iraq war after first supporting it. The crucial difference is that President Bush never lost his nerve. Despite the difficulties after the 2003 invasion and the terrible setbacks of 2006, he replaced his generals, sent more troops and embraced a new counterinsurgency strategy. The insurgency was defeated, and Mr. Bush left office with Iraq as a united, self-governing ally.

Despite the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnam was not a “futile” conflict. The U.S. effort bought time for Thailand and other nations in East and Southeast Asia to develop in relative peace. Their prosperity, in turn, showed the world the difference between the fruits of capitalism and the poverty of socialism. Like the Korean War, Vietnam needs to be understood as an honorable battle fought to a draw in America’s longer and victorious Cold War.

McNamara was a patriot whose faith in rationalism and bureaucratic planning led him to overconfidence both in the war on poverty during his years at the World Bank and at the Pentagon during Vietnam. But he deserves better from his liberal critics, since his real misfortune was to be the architect of their failed visions.