On the one hand...but on the other...

Ding! The Bell of Liberty rings out for excellent public schools; Dong! We celebrate our wonderful public hospitals....

It is the old battle of 'Right versus Left'.
The Left wants more money to be 'produced' for investment in 'public' services. They make no bones about this. We must all take the conscious decision to sell out and go to work for the Man, except that The Man is a little git in a corduroy jacket with elbow patches who likes to entertain the class on high days by singing songs of 'revolution' from 1968.
This old geyser is the last conscience-substitute before Pol Pot comes to the West, so treat his fantasies with indulgence or you may lose his protection.
Meanwhile, on the Right, we have a resurgence of embarrassment, an attempt to bury the near-successes of the past, that prehistoric age known as the Eighties.
Once more they try to achieve resurgent insurgence into the popular culture of the world, never quite understanding that when they talked of Freedom, people listened, but now they talk of 'responsibility', nobody thinks them qualified to give us just another guilt trip.
The 'Right' is moving closer to the 'centre', which means that they have abandonded such 'far right ideas' as Freedom(which might have caused the slug to fall back into the gutter) and replaced them with comforting notions such as 'nothing is really wrong, but we would like to take a turn'.
But at the moment, the Left has it.
And we are all diminished, especially in terms of the responsibility they urge us to take.
As if any responsible person would need their bidding.