Topic: Barack Obama
Memento mori, Mr. Obama Advice for President Obama on reflection on his inaugural address: Effecting positive and lasting reforms will be aided by a self-conscious humility.by B. S. Kalafut
(Centrist Libertarian)
Thursday, January 22, 2009
According to tradition, during a triumph, the highest honor in the Roman civic religion, one servant was assigned to whisper a constant reminder of humanity in the honored general's ear. By some accounts, it was "Respice post te; hominem te esse memento!": Look behind you; remember that you are a man. By others it is "Memento mori!": remember death, that is to say, remember that you are mortal. The practice is apochryphal, but the message has merit whether or not it was ever actually whispered at a triumph.
The reception given Barack Obama would perhaps even embarass all but the most vain vir triumphalis. It is not just the plebs who have elevated him in their hearts. Highly educated people--intellectuals, even--who are usually skeptical of power and only grudgingly admit leaders have come to project on our new President their own hopes, to presume he shares their values, and to expect that he, acting as President, will categorically transform American life. Except when applied retrospectively, superlatives are usually heard only from people who do not read--ignorant of history and having in some ways forgotten much of what they have witnessed, they are easily impressed--but intellectuals are speaking of Obama in superlatives. As they consider him one of them, perhaps more than any others the intellectuals on we ordinarily rely to provide the skepticism necessary for the health of our Republic have glamourized Obama in Virginia Postrel's sense of the word.
To think our new President will come to see himself literally as a god would be ridiculous. Nevertheless he would do well to take the advice whispered to the vir triumphalis. No mere human can be what the glamorizers would have him be, moreover, knowing the limits of his own capabilities as well as the limits of what is possible to achieve through government will help him to effect the change he promises.
Most thinking people will agree that, when a problem is properly the object of public policy, policy and thus government acting within Constitutional bounds should be judged by its efficiacy and not by the strictures of any ideology--in the words of President Obama's inaugural address, by "whether it works." However, Obama would do well to remember that, no matter who is President, the ability of the government to, without causing significant harm to others, help people "find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified" in the sense in which a schoolboy, a New Dealer, or a mental defective would understand the word "help", is extremely limited.
Signaling a definite change from his younger days as a member of Chicago's socialist New Party, Obama praises the market for "its power to generate wealth and expand freedom." But perhaps he has yet to realize what it means to be a man of the market; market mechanisms can "help" in ways no bureaucrat can.
Staff the Jobs at a Decent Wage Administration with the smartest economic minds and provide them the most up-to-date supercomputers, and they still will be unable to outdo the market's price signals in directing those who would sell their time for a wage to profitable occupations or in efficiently providing incentive for the specialized training demanded by employers. We have seen what various other governments' Bureaus of Care They Can Afford deliver, and to adopt such policies here would be to effect the largest deprivation in American history, improving conditions for those ill-served by the current, broken system but lowering quality and imposing rationing on the majority of us who are still well-served. And the Social Security old-age pension system stands as a rickety reminder of Franklin Roosevelt's vainglory, as likely, due to a combination of demographic pressure and moral hazard, to deprive tomorrow's elderly of a dignified retirement as to provide it.
It might be possible, by direct and simple act of government, to better this individual or that, but only by depriving the less visible, in subtle ways. Neither Barack Obama nor his appointees can better the United States of America simply by grasping institutions, laws, money, or people with their bare hands and putting them into proper order. No mere human being can do so. Pace Hayek, it is impossible for any individual or group to attain the requisite knowledge in a period of time short enough to enable action.
Obama need not, and ought not, fumble about as an empiricist and try different rules and programs until finding combinations that work. Nor ought he make the same mistake as many movement libertarians and mistake an accident of history for the One True Free Market. The formula that allows a mere mortal in government to better society can be found in his own inaugural address: restore science to its rightful place.
The relevant science is economics: not the dressed up excuses for ideology preached by groups such as the Mises Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies, but the empirical and increasingly quantitative science practiced and taught in our nation's universities. Although economics is not as mature a science as physics, biology, and chemistry, in part because it is inherently more difficult, enough progress has been made in the last few decades for economists to not only be able to warn us of bad policy but also for them to help us to establish markets to solve problems past generations only knew how to address with government programs. Our knowledge of individuals' needs and desires may be fundamentally limited, and the world may be populated by imperfect human beings, but economists can advise us as to how to change the groundrules so as to improve the general welfare. By changing the groundrules we can inch our way toward progress without having first to attain inhuman levels of knowledge and understanding.
Obama has already shown a promising respect for economic science in the quality of his National Economic Council and Council of Economic Advisers and his naming of A-list economists to other important posts. During his campaign, it appeared in his dispute with Austan Goolsbee over free trade that he would elevate ideological prejudices to be equal to expert advice, but of late it seems he has learned to listen, for example, to Christina Romer concerning taxation. Obama must learn to distinguish good advice from bad, and to put ideological convenience aside when doing so, especially when clumsy partisan Tom Daschle disagrees with scholar Peter Orszag over health care reform.
Humility also requires that Obama always remember that others are ends in themselves, equal to him as human beings, with interests of their own, and are not to be sacrificed to help preferred classes or have their welfare diminished to bring up others. In doing so, he can craft policies far superior to those of his New Deal and Great Society predecessors. The synthesis offered by Cass Sunstein, his law-school friend and choice to head the Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs, provides the blueprint: for the benefit of ignorant or irrational individuals, establish a coarsely responsible conduct as the default, but allow freedom of choice and reap the benefits of innovation as a consequence.
Obama is correct. Good policy is policy that works. But he is consequently incorrect in dismissing the size of government as an old-fashioned concern. Only fools and ideologues are concerned about the size of government in itself; it is the nature of small and large government that matters. A small government is a humble government, in which legislators and officials strive to set rules that enable human flourishing. Large government is a government of the vain, a government of officials who believe that by heroic action, direct intervention, and constant control, they can force flourishing.
Memento mori, Mr. Obama. Keep government small, respect your advisors' expertise, establish no program without considering it might fail, and know that through humility, through respect for the limits of human knowledge and the laws of economics, you can achieve more than those who would prefer heroics imagine possible.
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The views expressed in this
article are those of B. S. Kalafut only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. B. S. Kalafut is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
A libertarian wrote "Obama has already shown a promising respect for economic science in the quality of his National Economic Council and Council of Economic Advisers" ??? I guess it\'s the centrist part.
Some libertarians cannot appreciate non-libertarian intellects and scholarship and confound "doesn't share all of my values, or doesn't hold them as strongly" with "stupid" or "inept." I am not one of those.
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