But at its worst, the impulse toward total individualism--and its thoroughly disreputable theological handmaiden that holds that riches and health equal evidence of God's favor--propels us toward a Dickensian society distinguished by all manner of social ugliness.

The needle on the social dial usually inclines toward the individual side spectrum, that area which we typically call "freedom," by the way. The exceptions come in times of enormous crisis, such as the Depression, when Congress felt moved to put in place Social Security, and the mid-1960s, when evidence of rampant poverty among the elderly allowed for the creation of Medicare.

Where are we these days? Well, we've got a president who just vetoed legislation to expand a popular children's health insurance program and a Congress that can't muster the votes to override that veto. That's just a piece of a wider political culture, one in which the nominee for attorney general--the nation's highest law enforcement officer--recently claimed not to know what waterboarding is and, when informed, couldn't bring himself to call it torture.

We live in a time, to borrow an old expression, of "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost." Not an era to care much about the health of our children.