Loneliness is a major problem, but governments, especially central governments, can't fix it. In fact, they cause it: By taking over functions that have traditionally been performed locally, central governments have killed millions of the institutions and associations (families, communities, churches, service clubs . . . the "little platoons" extolled by de Tocqueville and Burke) where people came together to solve a local problem and, in the process, enjoyed each others' company.
It's the reason Russian society was so bankrupt after the fall of the Soviet Union.
It was a major focus of Robert Nisbet's sociology.
It was the whole point of Frank Chodorov's minor modern classic, The Rise and Fall of Society.
And now central governments want to form task forces and bureaus to address loneliness? That's like a cat-housing husband hiring a private detective to find out who keeps giving his wife the clap. Or, better, a tyrant seizing even more of his subjects' grain so he can fund a ministry to investigate the poverty that is ravishing his domain.
