Although I have been critical of our current governor, it's usually been to twit him for not cutting budgets sufficiently. I don't think Gov. Corbett has done enough to trim the costs of our mammoth state "higher education" system, which is overloaded with expendable administration.

I further believe that, while Corbett is spot on in wanting to privatize our state liquor monopoly, he should not be trying to feather the nests of other public employees by promising to pay off teachers with the proceeds gained from selling state-owned liquor stores. It seems wrong to mix something as desirable as privatizing liquor sales with something as silly as paying teachers to instruct adolescents in the proper use of alcoholic beverages. Let the parents or some voluntary group do the instructing.

Unfortunately, I'm not at all on the same page with most residents of this state, who hate Tom Corbett, presumably as a budget cruncher. According to the latest Franklin & Marshall poll, Corbett, who enjoys only a 26 percent approval rating, may be the most hated governor in Pennsylvania history. It seems that nothing he does is really popular.

For example, you'd think everyone but state employees working in the state-owned liquor stores would be applauding Corbett's proposal to privatize liquor sales. After all, state residents, according to extensive studies conducted by Commonwealth Foundation, are paying up to 50 percent more on their liquor purchases than people in surrounding states. And apparently the choice of alcoholic products in our state stores is more limited than what would be available in private operations.

Strangely enough, the privatizing plan resonates positively with only 52 percent of those polled. I suspect that once this idea was linked to the supposedly stingy Corbett, a plan that otherwise would be immensely popular, lost part of its appeal. It apparently makes no difference in terms of his popular standing that Corbett has worked tirelessly to promote shale fuel exploration, something that his Democratic opponents might not be doing.

Also unlike the Democrats and Corbett's free-spending predecessor, he is not beholden to public sector unions for his election. And his state budget, given rising costs, is still higher than previous budgets but not nearly as high as the one Gov. Rendell would likely be giving us. There is nothing here to suggest the governor is slashing our extravagant pensions for public employees.

This situation illustrates for me a general problem facing this country, perhaps even more critically than is the case in other Western countries. Unlike Canada or Germany, which have large welfare states but are willing to economize, in the U.S. voters just want more and more social programs and the politicians are too cowardly or ideologically driven to say "no."

I've never accepted the idiocy pushed on Fox News that the U.S. is a "right of center" country. But I also never realized until recently how undisciplined we've become as a government-dependent society.

Other social democratic countries focus attention on soaring public debts. We, by contrast, just ask the state to pay for more stuff, which in the end we finance out of our earnings or cover with Chinese loans.

I don't believe for a moment that this problem is confined to minorities who depend disproportionately on government redistribution programs. The 74 percent of those surveyed who are against our minimally penny-pinching governor includes far more than minority members.

I began noticing this intensified craving for more and bigger government programs during my later years as a professor. It was obvious by then that my students associated the welfare state with endless goodies, of which education loans would be only the first in a string of expected favors. I came to understand why the young, once employed, didn't resent paying disproportionately for benefits for retirees. They imagined they would be getting even more loot from the state once the time came for them to retire.

Notice my argument is not that we return to being a constitutional society with a strictly limited government. The hour for that is long over, and I may be in a diminishing number of those who regret that's the case. I just wish we became a better disciplined social democracy, like Canada, which does better in reining in unsustainable government costs.

As a free market economy, the U.S. now lags behind at least 10 other countries, according to the Index of Economic Freedom, and has been falling, with special force, during the last five years. The contention that, unlike Europeans, we don't accept a large welfare state is malarkey. What makes us different from other "progressive" societies may be the reason they can provide cheap socialized medicine and we probably couldn't. Other countries expect less from their governments and in return for being looked after as wards of the state, recognize there are limits as to what the state should be doing for them.
Paul E. Gottfried is a retired professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College. Email him at gottfrpe@etown.edu.