Now, just two comments on Barack Obama’s speech. He said “America is a friend of each person who seeks peace”. I expect he’ll be nominating Sheryl Crow as ambassador to Iran. She has a lovely but incredibly childish and naive view of foreign policy: “the way to not have wars is to not have enemies”. Well, that sounds great--if only we could get other people to cooperate with it. Thank you, Neville Chamberlain. That was certainly the issue with Hitler and Hirohito. We must have offended them deeply in some way to prompt them to bomb Pearl Harbor. Obviously, world leaders, despots, and tyrants never act based on selfish motives, but only in retaliation.

What Barack Obama should have said is “America is a friend of each person who seeks justice.” Justice will bring about peace, prosperity, human rights, balance, and a host of other good things. Peace has only very recently become the faddish thing to trumpet. Most intelligent people understand that peace costs—usually dearly. Peace comes at the cost of really tough decisions that aren’t usually popular, it comes at the cost of lives, it sometimes comes at the price of war. Only the naïve and the deliberately self-deceived refuse to see that.

Secondly, Obama said in his speech, “The question is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether or not it works”. This is a bit like saying, “The question is not whether to discipline a child or not, but to make sure the child obeys.” It’s pretty much universally accepted that disciplining a child is the only way to teach them right from wrong and how to obey. NOT disciplining a child is never shown to be effective.

Big government NEVER works, has never worked, never will work. The only government that works long term “for the people, by the people” is one that gets out of the people’s way, that sets the general boundaries of “fair play” and the rules for engagement, and then lets the people make their own destinies. There is no government in the history of the world that got bigger and bigger and benefitted the people. In our own country, we can see ourselves that the times we have gotten in trouble (and one need look no further than our current crises) were BECAUSE the government interfered and dictated what should have been the realm of the market. It is now widely-acknowledged that FDR’s New Deal (although he may have had the best motives) did not help pull us out of the great depression, but instead kept us down longer than necessary.

The motives are the real issue. Compassion can be displaced. Parents call it tough love. In our desire to help people, we can end up harming them. The whole give a man a fish thing. It’s a cliché because it’s true.

"A wise and frugal government.... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." --Thomas Jefferson, Inaugural Address, 3/4/1801