“You know the way to boost your poll numbers is not do anything,” Obama said at a town hall gathering in Ohio last week. “That’s how you do it. You don’t offend anybody. I’d have real high poll numbers. All of Washington would be saying, ‘What a genius.’
Libertarianism would indeed say that it takes a genius to do nothing.
Jan 27 2010
It's the latest meme. The U.S. is ungovernable, because of a) Senate procedures b) Republican obstructionism c) polarization d) special interests etc. I've seen it from Marc Ambinder, Steven Pearlstein, and others. I'm too lazy to copy links, but my guess is that you have seen it, too. I want to offer my own theor...
Jan 27 2010
Take it as given that U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable. It was unsustainable before Obama became President, and one can argue that he has made it worse. It was unsustainable before Bush became President, and one can argue that he made it worse. That is not the issue here. The issue is whether this unsustainabili...
Jan 27 2010
The Washington Post reports, "You know the way to boost your poll numbers is not do anything," Obama said at a town hall gathering in Ohio last week. "That's how you do it. You don't offend anybody. I'd have real high poll numbers. All of Washington would be saying, 'What a genius.' Libertarianism would indeed say th...
READER COMMENTS
hanmeng
Jan 27 2010 at 10:23am
Or Taoists (“Governing a great state is like cooking small fish.”)
David
Jan 27 2010 at 10:48am
Adam Smith wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbors, has surely very little positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not doing. We may often fulfill all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing”. Is a politician’s drive towards self-aggrandizement better served by mere negative justice, or by “positive merit”.
[Smith’s quote is available in context at http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS2.html#II.II.9 –Econlib Ed.]
Les
Jan 27 2010 at 6:46pm
Do I correctly recall that the Hippocratic Oath contains wording like: “First, do no harm … ?”
Loof
Jan 27 2010 at 8:50pm
Yes, governing a great state is like cooking small fish — best fried from the bottom up. Yet, frying small fish is best done from the top down with ever bigger states and/or ever bigger estates.
Methinks
Jan 28 2010 at 4:22pm
He clearly sees his mistake but lacks the ability to learn from it. That really encourages me to turn over my health care decisions to him.
Comments are closed.