SACRAMENTO - The latest Liberty Fund book catalogue brings the welcome news that Liberty Fund is going to publish a new edition of Kenneth Minogue's 1963 classic, The Liberal Mind. And not a moment too soon. It has been a tough week.

"Liberalism," Professor Minogue wrote back when liberalism was at its apogee, "develops from a sensibility which is dissatisfied with the world because it contains suffering ... The sufferings of any class of individuals is for liberals a political problem, and politics has been taken as an activity not so much for maximizing happiness as for minimizing suffering ... The point of suffering situations is that they convert politics into a crudely conceived moral battleground."

The age of Clinton is supposed to mean that liberalism is dead-"No one here but us centrists," is the Clinton message-but if liberalism is dead, it is like a vampire that won't lay down quietly in its grave, but instead stalks the land looking for more victims from which to suck blood.

The "suffering situation" aspect of liberalism has been in full bloom in recent days. If there is a wrong or tragic situation anywhere, then, according to the reflexive liberal mind, a new law must be passed. Never mind that the old laws haven't worked or been enforced. And so we are told with a straight face that while a crack dealer who violates several existing but unenforced laws against leaving a loaded gun within reach of a six year old, surely one more gun law will do the trick. What we really see here is not realistic policymaking, but the imperative of compassion on the part of politicians, who above all must be seen To Care About the Issue, whether the new law works or not.

For sheer chutzpah, nothing can surpass the Vice President's embrace of campaign finance reform. The logic of his argument seems to be that if I can't obey the existing campaign finance laws, let us have new laws to violate. In the Vice President's case, campaign finance reform becomes a form of compassion for himself. With a few new laws on the books, he reasons, maybe I'll be saved from making a fool of myself at the next Buddhist temple fundraiser.

But few things so surely display the insatiable appetite of liberalism than OSHA's proposed ergonomic rules. OSHA was founded 30 years ago to regulate against workplace hazards that led to death or serious injury. Now OSHA is worried about stiff necks and sore forearms, especially from office equipment such as computers that have liberated millions of Americans from the burden of the kind of manual labor that used to lead to real injuries. The ergonomic rules coming down from OSHA will cost the private sector billions to comply.

OSHA's crusade bears out Minogue's comparison of liberalism with medieval dragon-slayers: "He needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes-the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged, and underdeveloped. As an aging warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons-for the big dragons were now harder to come by."

-Steven Hayward