I had criticisms of the federal government myself—over-surveillance, the declaration of war in Iraq, letting off Wall Street speculators behind the 2008 crash, for example. But my criticisms were based on a faith in the idea of good government. Mike lands his boat at his dock and we return to his dining room table. He has told me that we don’t need Social Security or Medicare. “Take Social Security. If you and I hadn’t had to pay into it,” he told me, “we could have invested that money ourselves—even given the 2008 downturn—you and I would be millionaires by now.”
