In his inaugural address, President Obama declared that the debate over "big" versus "small" government is outmoded. It's a question of "whether government works" that we should address ourselves to, asserted Mr. Obama.Yet that's just the point, isn't it? The "big" or "small" debate has always been predicated on a shared presumption: that one or the other is fundamentally better equipped to "work" for America.
(The "big" versus "small" argument, by the way, is better understood as a debate over "unfettered" versus "limited" government. And limitations lead to realistic and responsible outcomes. There's a reason that 49 states constitutionally require balanced budgets.)
We like to imagine that with new legislation and executive initiatives, we can correct the flaws of failed programs. We imagine that one president and a cadre of 435 can manage and coordinate national efforts of every scope -- including job creation, medical insurance, welfare, social security, transportation, education, and banking regulation, to speak of just the highlights, all while directing war efforts on a global scale. But do these efforts "work"?
Mr. Obama is fond of positioning himself as a simple pragmatist. Let's ask: is this a pragmatic view of the real ability of government? Do we have government that, by Mr. Obama's own metric for judging success, "works"?
A year after the stimulus package, employment is higher in 47 states. By any measure, long term infrastructure investment has not been achieved. The market remains on a precipice, as Thomas Hoenig, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has warned. "Stunning" deficit projections," according to Mr. Hoenig, mean the "US risks its next crisis."
Yet the federal budget for 2011 is the largest in history, and Mr. Obama is on track to become the biggest debtor president since FDR during the Great Depression. So much for the "ethic of responsibility" that Mr. Obama spoke of on the campaign trail.
Meanwhile, the president of General Motors is having a hard enough time simply selling cars. Gen. McCrystal is scambling to execute a strategy for winning an already nearly decade long near war in Afghanistan.
If the president of a company struggles to do one thing -- sell cars, and the Commander in Afghanistan is having difficulty in destroying terrorist infrastructure abroad, what is "pragmatic" about our notion that centralized, federal government can command and control, coerce and cajole, a diverse nation across an immensely broad spectrum of concerns?
When companies struggle to market a single product, and military commanders struggle to achieve specific objectives, what sense is there in cobbling together a myriad set of interests impacting a national economy and calling such an approach "pragmatic"?
So long as politicians believe that they can spur job creation in a distressed economy by any other means than combining spending restraint with tax relief, they're confining themselves to a dream world.
It's the rest of us who will be stuck in the real world their lack of focus has created, and we'll be all the poorer for believing that grand, unfocused ambitions to re-order and restructure an immensely complex culture ever constituted a reasonable agenda for governance.
