But life isn’t really a high-wire act, is it? Or at least it didn’t use to be. If you put the average chap—or even Barack Obama or Barney Frank—in spangled leotard and tights and on a unicycle and shove him out across the wire, he’s likely to fall off. But put the average chap in spangled leotard and tights out into the world and tell him to get a job, find accommodation, raise a family, take responsibility, and he can do it. Or he used to be able to, until the government decided he was “vulnerable” and needed a “safety net.”

When did human life become impossible without a “safety net”? My neighbor’s family came to my corner of New Hampshire in the winter of 1767–68 when her great-great-great-whatever dragged his huge millstones up the frozen river from Connecticut to build the first gristmill on a swift-running brook in the middle of uncleared forest in a four-year-old township comprising a dozen families. And he did it without first applying for a federal business development grant. No big deal. Her family’s nothing special, my town’s nothing special: that’s the point. It was routine—in a pre-“safety net” society.

In his book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, Paul Rahe writes, “Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.”⁴¹ But today the state cocoons “one’s own affairs” so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge.

The welfare state is less a social safety net than a kind of cage—a large cage but a cage nonetheless. And its occupants are not a trapeze act but more like an expensive zoo animal. Think of a panda. He’s the most expensive item in any zoo’s budget: those American institutions lucky enough to host a big cuddly panda spend some three million per annum on the cute l’il feller.

They feed him, they protect him, they give him everything he could possibly want—except a purpose. Eventually, like Europeans, he can’t even be bothered to breed. You put the comeliest lady panda you can find in the cage with him, and he’s not interested. He just lies around all day. To reprise Charles Murray’s line, Big Government “drains too much of the life from life.”

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”—by definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

THE KINGDOM OF THE BONOBO

A few years ago, Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics wrote that ours is the age of “the new Epicureans” in which the “freedom to choose” trumps all.⁴²

A childless couple can choose to conceive.

A female couple can choose to conceive.

A male couple can choose to conceive. Barrie and Tony from Chelmsford, England, had been trying for a child for ages but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them this might be because they’re both men.

So they advertised for an egg donor on the Internet and then found a Californian woman with a nine-month opening in her womb. A court in the Golden State agreed to register both men as the fathers of their children not so much on the technical grounds that they had “co-mingled” their sperm before FedExing it to their Fallopian timeshare and her turkey baster, but out of a more basic sympathy that this is how Barrie and Tony “self-identify” and it would be cruel to deny them. The mother did not rate a credit on the birth certificate. Nor did the turkey baster. This would seem to be in defiance of reality, but what price biology when measured against self-esteem?⁴³

A woman in Bend, Oregon, can choose to become a man, and then a “pregnant man.”⁴⁴

A man can choose to become a woman, get halfway there, and then decide it’s more fun to “live in the grey area,” like “award-winning Canadian writer” Ivan E. Coyote, who prefers to be addressed as he/she and self-identifies as a “very masculine reading estrogen-based organism,” and resents the way the hicks at U.S. Customs and Border Protection don’t have a check box for that.45 In 2009 Mr./Ms. Coyote was detained by CBP along with an American friend, “a tall, feminine woman with a heavy moustache.”

Biologically, Barrie or Tony, but not both, is the sole father of their child; the “pregnant man” is pregnant but not a man; the he/she living in “the grey area” is in reality black or white—at least according to what we used to call “the facts of life.” But issuers of passports, drivers’ licenses, and birth certificates increasingly defer to the principle of “self-identification.”