The feisty Granite Stater Mark Steyn makes some good comparisons between the U.S. and Canada, and he makes them well; truthfully, respectfully and with wit. He does so in last month's Imprimis ( "first things" in Latin).

"I drive a lot between Quebec and New Hampshire, and you don’t really need a border post to tell you when you’ve crossed from one country into another. On one side the hourly update on the radio news lets you know that Canada’s postal workers are thinking about their traditional pre-Christmas strike—the Canadians have gotten used to getting their Christmas cards around Good Friday, and it’s part of the holiday tradition now—or that employees of the government liquor store are on strike, nurses are on strike, police are on strike, etc. Whereas you could listen for years to a New Hampshire radio station and never hear the word “strike” except for baseball play-by-play."

and

"But in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes all the secondary impulses of society—welfare entitlements from cradle to grave—over all the primary ones. And in that, Canada is obviously not alone."

What a great phrase to describe wealth redistribution (secondary impulses) and wealth creation (primary impulses)

I find more and more conservatives (i.e. George Will at CPAC last month) framing the argument for capitalism as "Ok, the people want a welfare state, but they need to realize they need to keep in place free market capitalism because it is the only system that can support a welfare state." Maybe that is a realistic marketing approach, but its foundation seems to be on a slippery slope.