The Role of Government: Competing Ideologies

In January 1981, the United States was facing an inflation rate higher than today's; higher unemployment rate than today's; higher interest rates than today's; higher marginal tax rates than we have today; lower productivity than we experience today and lower GDP growth. Confronting that situation, Ronald Reagan said the following in his Inaugural Address:

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we, as Americans, have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.

From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

On February 9, 2009, addressing our present economic crisis, Barack Obama pronounced the following:

It is absolutely true that we can't depend on government alone to create jobs or economic growth. That is and must be the role of the private sector. But at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs. And breaking that cycle is exactly what the plan that's moving through Congress is designed to do.

Mr Obama could have instead responded to the weakened state of the private sector (debilitated largely due to government's intrusion into the marketplace) by stating that it will be the aim of his administration to refortify the private sector by cutting taxes and reducing government spending. But that would require Obama to trust individuals more than government. He does not. Reagan did.

Government by it's very nature injects politics into decision-making -- almost all acts and decisions have heavy doses of political calculation. Economic and financial problems require economic and financial solutions, not ones laden with political ploys. Hyping the crisis by loudly proclaiming that doom will befall us if we do not accept whatever Obama and Congress cook up is a sinister way to push through a political agenda that has little effect on the crisis itself, except to worsen it and therefore give rise to another round of socialist measures.

The excesses of government and politics have damaged us enough already. The Obama/Pelosi/Reid team is government on steroids. Political excesses can only lead to abuse and a loss of liberty, think of the madness of the French Revolution. Think of other instances when governments leeches on to a crisis as a power-grab excuse.

In his January 1996 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton announced that "the era of big government is over." I think of Mark Twain's rejoinder: "Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated."