Right after his election, I wrote about giving Barack Obama a clean slate.
So today, I give Barack Obama a 100% approval rating. If and when he screws up, I’ll deduct points. Let’s make it a maximum of 10 points for each individual annoying event. If he does something great-I’ll add points. I’m that kind of guy. Let’s see how long he stays above 50%.
I decided not to take any points away until he actually took office. It didn’t take long for his first minor infraction–in which Obama loses one percentage point.
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.
This is fundamentally wrong. Size does matter. You can easily look back at the founders and see that the size of the government was incredibly important to them. But, I’ll let Glenn hit you with the quotes from the 1700s.
What bothers me is that this logic puts you in a never ending circle that only leads to larger, more ineffective government. When something fails, you try to fix it. How do you do that? You assign more resources.
That’s what government does with schools.
Schools fail->someone says they’re underfunded->there’s more funding->schools continue to fail->repeat
So, if you don’t start with at least a general goal of making government smaller, and allow for very few exceptions, you will reliably find things that don’t work, throw money at them, and then unavoidably make them more of a nightmare then they were before.
But it doesn’t end there. How does Obama define a government that “works?” Four ways:
- help families find jobs (I assume he means individuals in families, unless he’s looking to create a new Partridge Family-esque industry)
- have those jobs pay a “decent wage”
- get them “care they can afford” (I assume that means health care, unless it’s just encouragement and moral support)
- and get them “a retirement that is dignified”
Now, if all the government had to do was find people jobs, make them earn whatever random number they find “decent”, and supply sufficiently-caring-health-care–I’d be incredibly confident. How could that possibly go wrong?
But, how exactly do you guarantee dignity?
