Asking Too Much?

Anne Applebaum, writing in today's Washington Post:

If you don't live in this country all of the time, and I don't, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans -- with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs -- demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don't simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

And there's more:

...we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we also rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created -- democratically, constitutionally, openly -- to deliver it.