As recent history demonstrates, cultural entitlement is the precursor to political entitlement. With notably few exceptions and in a shameful, seamless, fashion, politicians faithfully follow this model by perpetuating our economic ills with their excessive responses to otherwise manageable problems.

Liberal commentators, of course, are in the vanguard of this process and like overly attentive herd dogs nip at the heels of their charges, in this case Congressional liberals and the liberal-in-chief, President Obama. For a prime example, we turn to Bob Herbert, whose piece in today’s New York Times is prototypically ingenious in its ability to thoroughly miss the target.

Herbert laments the most recent unemployment numbers and makes the commendable first step of recognizing that those without jobs are suffering. He criticizes Mr. Obama for not pushing for another stimulus package and quotes polls showing that people believe banks and Wall Street benefited from the first stimulus.

Thanks to the well-entrenched entitlement mentality, underwritten by the modern liberal polity, average Americans now look to the government for resolution of their private problems. Indeed, whether it’s getting a job, paying for health insurance, or finding “affordable” housing, all of which have been rightfully our own problems to solve, the government is now seen as the proper intermediary.

Herbert’s blinkered narrative continues:

We’re running on a treadmill that is carrying us backward. Something approaching 10 million new jobs would have to be created just to get back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007.  There is nothing currently in the works to jump-start job creation on that scale.

Predictably, he recommends a “massive long-term campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure,” forgetful that a significant portion of the $785 billion in the first stimulus package was supposed to go to “shovel-ready” jobs. Some of that did, in fact, trickle down to fund such jobs, but the outcome by no means met expectations.

But, he’s absolutely correct when he writes that there is “nothing currently in the works to jump-start job creation,” which after nine months of Obama’s tenure and in the context of a Democratic-controlled Congress, is a savage criticism indeed.

What the Herberts of the world astonishingly overlook is the abundance of evidence from recent history: To wit, every time marginal taxes have been reduced, along with corporate and capital gains taxes, not only have federal receipts increased, but employment has increased and, the silent killer known as inflation has been kept in check.

But although reducing taxes creates freedom, it doesn’t feed the entitlement Leviathan, rather, it starves it and thereby inhibits political power, and that is simply unacceptable to the modern liberal.