Writing on American Mind, Professor David L. Schaefer has a devastating review of a book that argues for collectivism. The book is by Alissa Quart and titled Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. I would bet that the book becomes assigned reading for a good many college students.

Schaefer writes, “Quart invents a straw man of people so committed to ‘pull yourself by your bootstraps’ individualism that they see ‘even asking for help’ from other individuals—even ‘close friends and partners’—as ‘something to avoid at all costs.’ To overcome such attitudes, Quart urges that we learn to ‘value . . . the power and skill of being dependent.’”

Of course it’s a straw man. Hardly any people were ever like that. The problem is that once being dependent on others becomes the norm, things start to fall apart.

Leftists used to think about government assistance as just a needed stepping stone to independence. But, Schaefer observes, “Today’s progressive liberalism has traveled a long way in the nearly six decades since LBJ spoke. The rapid expansion of government assistance, including a broadening of eligibility standards, has generated a substantial class of what economist Nicholas Eberstadt calls ‘men without work.’ Their days are taken up largely, as he reports, with drug use, social media, and other nonproductive enterprises that benefit neither themselves nor their community.”

Telling people that it’s fine to live at the expense of others through government largesse is cancerous. It starts as a small tumor but inevitably grows and spreads.