From our guest poster Bruce Kesler:
If conditions and challenges weren’t ominous enough for the new Obama administration, his strong-willed mother-in-law is moving into the White House. If that alone isn’t enough for most, imagine yourself facing a relocation to very difficult new job, almost every one with power affecting you having differing wants and confronting you with demands often at odds with your own, literally not enough money in the world to satisfy everyone’s desires and the demands increasingly undercutting even necessities, and gangs of lethal thugs roaming the streets around you. Even your formerly most staunch supporters begin to report that most of your previous smooth talk is empty that got you the job and that you’re in over your head. Like vultures expecting a fat carcass but facing a rotting pigeon of a meal, they squabble and fight each other. Almost all your mentors expose they haven’t really much clue what to do. Well, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t just do something, stand there. Most of the challenging conditions will sort themselves out. Running around like a chicken without a head, or doing for the sake of doing, will not only likely have little positive effect but will probably have worse consequences.
Let’s go through a brief list:
The Economy: Not every one, but in aggregate, individuals are better deciders of what is worth working for and spending on than any Delphic group in Washington. Money is the motivation to work and risk. The only economic measure by Washington with a track-record of supporting and increasing this motivation is low taxes. Federal spending, on anything, is inefficient and tends to favor means and ends that reduce individual incentives. Further, in excess -- and multi-trillion dollar printing of dollars is certainly excess, it has been proven, sadly repeatedly, to lead to lasting inflation that is even more impoverishing and destructive of incentives.
Healthcare: As we’ve become wealthier, compared to any other nation, the portion of our personal and national incomes that need be devoted to food, clothing and shelter has declined. That has unleashed the means for medical technologies and treatments that, although often overused, we decide we can afford and deem worthwhile to our better living. Every scheme for “reforming” healthcare is based on forcing us, against our better judgment and self-caring, to have less healthcare, through reduced access and innovation. Bureaucrats’ choices of what they think “cost-effective” for spending our own earnings and taxes are not our choices. The only ones to benefit are government-employment and government-employee unions.
Education: Surely, a well-educated workforce, allowed incentives to be productive, enriches most. Major portions of our enormous spending on education, however, are wasted or siphoned off to non-enriching ends. In higher education, we have lavish campuses failing to serve quality or practical degrees. In primary education, we have multiplying programs that shortchange the basics, while teacher unions expend their huge political war chests to battle reforms. Allowing the influx of uneducated illegal immigrants has diverted a large percentage of education spending to their remedial teaching, reducing standards and programs for excellence among the rest. Border and employer enforcement in motion has and will reduce illegal immigration. Budget restraints are directed by those in power to punish the customers. With the necessity of budget restraints evident, those ideologic and self-serving pedagogues will lose some of their influence to undermine core, productive education.
National Defense: From the pains of combat, we’ve learned that a larger professional armed forces is critical. At the same time, sophisticated, expensive major weapons systems cannot be avoided if we are to have deterring diplomacy with major adversaries, or soundly defeat them if diplomacy fails. The ‘90’s, Clinton path of virtually ignoring the emergence of such threats only leads to larger, more dangerous crises. Cutting defense spending to fuel wasteful domestic spending by Washington is proven suicidal behavior. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Cutting the ounce is deceptively self-destructive.
Middle East: Our avoidance of domestic sources of energy and of transmission has increased our dependence upon and hefty self-impoverishing buying of oil from hostile and trouble-making countries. Take that US financial underpinning out from under them and they are less of a global or regional threat, less capable of attacking Israel as well. A regional conflict is less of a threat to itself or the world.
Having, thus, freed up Obama from otherwise counter-productive activities outside the White House, he personally will benefit not only from things sorting themselves out better but will have more time to deal with his mother-in-law.
