Ultimately government has a responsible to provide a level playing field to ensure that everybody gets a far start in life and can at least survive throughout it  Government, especially in a developed nation and even more so in the wealthiest nation in the world, should be able to ensure that children are not hungry, the mentally ill are not living on the streets, borders are policed, veterans don’t live in squalor, the population can read, crime is controlled, the elderly don’t freeze to death and a million other markers of a civilized society.  This is particularly true of children but most people need a helping hand at one time or another in life. However, the obscenity of children destined to fail before their lives have even started- condemned to schools that offer no hope and communities that offer no safety- would be disturbing anywhere in the world.  In a nation that prides itself as having the highest standard of living on the planet- and is unquestionably the richest and most powerful- levels of poverty and despair that are seen nowhere else in the developed world are simply obscene. By every measure, infant mortality, life expectancy, educational standards, child poverty, percentage of incarcerated adults, homicides per thousand deaths and many more, America lags considerably behind Japan, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and the rest of the developed world [i] .  All of the indicators mentioned above have been adversely affect during the thirty year obsession with pushing the government back in the name of handing unfettered control over to big business and the vicissitudes of the market.  Americans pay lower taxes than Western Europe and get, as a result, a much worse return on their money [ii] .  [i] Newsweeks Interactive Graphic of the World’s Best Countries. Hosted on the Daily Beast and elsewhere.  [ii] Jeffrey Sachs. "The Case for Bigger Government." Time. January 8th, 2009