By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The young drop coverage to avoid higher premiums
''There never was a time ... when the mass of men had less to do with the way in which they were governed." This protest didn't come from some Tea Partyer in the Midwest frustrated at our out-of-control government. It was penned nearly a century ago by Hilaire Belloc, an Edwardian poet, historian, war chronicler, artilleryman, wayfarer, political essayist and sometimes member of the British Parliament. Belloc was a prototype for today's know-it-all celebrity pundits, with the exception that he really did know quite a lot regarding just about everything.
A proposed book-burning by an evangelical pastor in a Florida college town this weekend has inflamed sensitivities from Afghanistan to Washington, D.C., and added a wrinkle in U.S. relations with Muslims abroad.
"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine, but for unbelievers, here is proof of its divinity, that no merely human institution run with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight," he wrote.
As far back as the 1930s, he warned, "We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise."
