Monday, March 2, 2009
The big stir today is over Rush Limbaugh and wanting Obama to fail. How dare anyone want the President to fail? And particularly how dare anyone say that?
I think the problem here is deeper than it looks, although it's a pretty common problem in policy analysis. To many, the test of a policy is its intentions. If the intentions are good, then it's a good policy, and we all ought to want it to succeed. Others have a different criterion: they judge a policy on its actual results, or, if it's being proposed, then on the predictable results of that policy. Thus, if the intentions are good, it's shameful to wish for it to fail -- even if the predictable results are not what the policy is intended to accomplish, and may in fact be precisely the opposite of what the policy intends.
Obama means well for the country. His vision is not mine: I would suspect that his vision of The Good Society has a lot less freedom and a lot more Federal Government control over individual lives than I care for. That is his picture of The Good Society, and it is one that many have held over the centuries, even millennia; a society of peaceful inhabitants all well behaved, few imprisoned, with government insuring against mishaps and accidents and unemployment, government providing high quality health care to everyone, no one having to do without, no one hungry, few homeless. I could go on but surely the picture is clear? You can find it in many places. Start with various tracts of The Fabian Society...
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