To her credit, Democratic congressional candidate Ann McLane Kuster did not spend all of her time at Tuesday’s debate trying to make voters think 2nd District Republican Rep. Charlie Bass was a cold-hearted monster. She generally stuck to the issues and tried to explain how her views differed from those of Rep. Bass. As a result, voters learned a lot about Kuster, who is making her second consecutive attempt to unseat Bass.

For example, they learned that Kuster believes the economy can be brought back to life with more federal stimulus spending. “We know how to get the economy going. We know you have to invest in opportunity today,” she said, advocating increased federal spending on schools and other infrastructure — precisely what the $831 billion stimulus bill did to little avail in 2009.

Voters learned that Kuster heartily approves of Obama’s “You didn’t build that” comment. Kuster defended Obama’s remarks, and when Bass talked of driving a delivery truck in his younger days, she responded: “Who built the roads, who built the bridges, who built the highways? I think it’s basic civics,” she said.

It is basic civics. The taxpayers hired people to build them on everyone’s behalf. Kuster, like Obama, suggests that because we have already paid for necessary government infrastructure, we therefore must be more heavily taxed to pay for more of it — and for a lot of other things that are not necessary. That is not basic civics, it is an overturning of the American social contract.

To Kuster and Obama, you owe your success in large part to the government, and therefore the government has an additional claim on your earnings. In reality, we created the government in part to create the infrastructure, and we paid for it, so the government has no claim to any additional share on top of that. It is a question of who serves whom. Does the state serve us, or do we serve it? Kuster seems to think, like Obama, that we serve it.