About that Speech…
Barack Obama has been my president for a week now. Yes, he is my president, because I am an American, and whether he was my choice or not, it is my responsibility as a citizen and as a Christian to pray for him and support him, not in every policy initiative or decision, but in the sense that we have an elected government whereby we at least ostensibly have a voice and a say.
I did not watch the inauguration. While I do rejoice in both the election of a black president, and in the orderly transfer of power that once again took place–and wrote about my gladness with regard to each–I was in no mood to celebrate. I truly believe that we’ve made a profound mistake in electing Barack Obama as president, though in the next breath, I confess that in John McCain, Americans were presented with a choice between the devil we know and the devil we don’t (and the latter, with his mindless mantra of “change”, won out).
I haven’t read all of Obama’s speech, and probably won’t, but one line stands out:
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.
No sir, Mr. President, but respectfully, I ask that first question. Mussolini made the trains run on time, Mr. President; Italian fascism “worked”. I fully reject a government based, taking Mr. Obama at his word, on pragmatism, on “what ‘works'”. I would argue that there are principles that are at the heart of the American experiment, principles of limited government, individual freedom, and a body of rights that inhere not to the government, but to its individual citizens and, expanded, to the several states. Generally speaking, government doesn’t solve problems, Mr. President; it most often is the problem, particularly the federal government.
Whose fault is the recession? Not totally, of course, but in large measure, the government tinkering with the free market. And now, after Bush’s ridiculous bailouts, we want more of the same, $825 billion now (this is “change”? Oh, I get it…”change” means a little more of the same…hmmmm…). The government is too big, Mr. President; mammoth, enormous, indeed gargantuan in comparison with the vision of the founders of our nation upon whose shoulders you pretend to stand, so much so that none of them would recognize what liberals like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Dick Nixon, and George W. Bush have made of our republic. They must be turning over in their graves…because if individual freedoms and rights still matter in America, then big government, by very definition, does not work.
The interesting thing about the “it works” argument (rather than whether the Government should be doing it in the first place) is that if it doesn’t work, then it’s not flawed, just that not enough taxpayers’ money has been put in. You get used to that sort of argument from Labour supporters whenever the latest pet project doesn’t work.