Another SOTU, another opportunity for gamesmanship in place of statesmanship. Last night, the president continued his impossible quest to be all things to all people. As with his previous State of the Union addresses, his message resonated with roughly half the audience seated in the House chamber. The other half—the “red” half—sat motionless and silent for the bulk of the address.
The speech was just shy of 7,000 words in length, and much of it covered well-trod ground. There was the usual appeal to class warfare (“a billionaire [should] pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes”) and the usual digging in of heels (“I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place”).
In the one or two places where the speech managed to cut ice, the president was playing small ball, such as in his proposal to sign legislation banning insider trading by members of Congress.
But there was one paragraph that stood out among all others. It was packaged in a typically self-congratulatory effort to frame his grand design for America in the broader context of history. What made the comment unique was its blatantly self-contradictory nature:
I'm a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.
Barack Obama—under whose watch the federal government has risen to 26% of the economy and the total debt held by the public has reached 63% of GDP—is professing to favor limited government?
Maybe the problem is that Obama believes there is nothing the government can’t do better than the private sector. But time and again, experience has proved this assumption wrong. In 2010, the South Carolina Department of Education privatized four schools that were 98% black in enrollment. In the space of one year, math scores on the Palmetto Assessment of State Standardized test (PASS) increased on average by 11%. No better example of government’s inability to equal, let alone outperform, the private sector is the United States Postal Service, which is debt-ridden and on the verge of bankruptcy. Private companies that were created to do the job it couldn't, meanwhile, are doing just fine.
Here is another quote that the president and all presidents after him would do well to heed. The advice is from economist Milton Friedman:
When government—in pursuit of good intentions—tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the costs come in inefficiency, lack of innovation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
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