If Mark Steyn writes a simple grocery list, it’s likely to be a more enlightening and entertaining read than 98% of what you’ll find in mainstream papers. But his column yesterday, titled “Right Turn on Main Street,” is a masterwork of opinion journalism.

Here are a few tidbits.

On the “Tea Party” protests:

Why do the protestors get it? The Obama project is not difficult to understand. It’s been accomplished in many other parts of the western world: If you expand the dependent class and the government class, you can build a permanent governing coalition, and stick the beleaguered band in the middle with the tab.

On the demoralizing effect of big government:

At a certain point, why bother? As fast as you climb the ladder, you’ll be taxed and regulated down the chute back to the bottom rung. You’ll be frantically peddling the treadmill seven days a week so that the statist succubus squatting on your head can sluice the fruits of your labors to Barney Frank and the new “green jobs” czar and whichever less hooker-friendly “community organizer” racket picks up the slack from Acorn, as well as to untold millions of bureaucrats micro-regulating you till your pips squeak while they enjoy vacations and benefits you’ll never get. Who needs it? If you have to work, work for the government: You can’t be fired and you can retire in your early 50s. But running your own business is for chumps.

On the uniquely American appetite for “liberty:”

In the wake of the economic meltdown last fall, there were protests from Iceland to Bulgaria, with mobs all demanding the same thing of their rulers: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? This is the only country in the developed world where hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you’d only get the hell out of my life – or at least confine yourself to constitutional responsibilities.

Please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.