Would you Rather Have Obama Golf or Govern?
By Selwyn Duke
AmericanThinker.com
After seeing Barack
Obama's golf swing,
I'm confronted with the staggering possibility that he might actually be
better at governing than golfing. And this is despite the fact that he
seems to devote more time to the latter, an impression that has won him
much bad publicity.
Given that George W. Bush was hammered for spending
less time on the links (proportionately), it's not surprising that
conservatives would consider turnabout fair play. As for Main Street,
since golf is a Wall Street game, time spent golfing never plays well
among the folks who cling to guns or
religion or antipathy to people who aren't like themselves
(like golfers, I suppose). Yet I must part company with most on the
right. I want Obama to play as much golf as possible, even if we
taxpayers must pay his greens fees.
This isn't just because
Obama's sporting passions confirm that he isn't actually a clone of
golf-hating
Marxist Hugo Chavez. It's mainly because we're better off having the
president scaring earthworms everywhere than double-bogeying domestic
affairs, shanking foreign policy, hitting the budget fat, landing in a
bunker with Iranian nuclear ambitions and making water a hazard with
oil.
All joking aside,
reactions to presidents' leisure activities are so often irrational.
For example, hacker documentarian Michael Moore used footage of Bush
playing golf to paint the 43rd president
negatively, yet the reality is that if even if it had been the only time
Bush played golf, it would still have been used for propaganda purposes.
But do we really think a president isn't going to kick back like the
rest of us?
Many will say there's no equivalence, as the
commander-in-chief sits at the helm of a nation that must navigate
perilous waters. Yet, not only is there always some crisis somewhere,
there's also a more important issue here: Do we really want a president
so hands-on that he has his hands on everything? That's how you end up
with statism.
My point here is not that we should lay off
Obama it is a larger one. When you scrape away the effort to score
political points and the fact that Obama can't get his priorities any
straighter than his drives, what is actually being expressed through the
criticism of vacationing presidents is that they aren't governing
enough.
In reality, though, our government governs too
dang much.
Where we
often see this misguided lamentation is when people complain, as they
have in the past, of a "do-nothing" Congress. But, when saying this, do
we ever ponder what a legislature does? It produces new laws,
regulations and mandates, which are, by definition, removals of
freedom. This is because such measures state that there is something
you must or must not do. Thus, do you really want Congress to be more
productive? Remember, when a car company is more productive, you get
more cars; when a gold mine is more productive, you get more gold; when
American workers are more productive, you get a higher GDP. But what do
you get when the government is more productive?
Less freedom.
Oh, yeah, you do get more laws, regulations
and mandates, those removals of freedom. You like that trade-off?
Since government is a necessary evil, it
should only be used when necessary. For example, I spent a month in
Maine some years ago and didn't see even one police cruiser in all of
the central and northern parts of the state. Obviously, crime was so
rare that a noticeable police presence just wasn't necessary. Now,
should Mainers have complained about a do-nothing police force?
Remember also that a
healthy civilization doesn't rely on its central government to play
puppeteer. First, government isn't the only entity that governs --
there's also something called society. If
society functions properly, most citizen behavior is controlled through
its traditions and social codes. Chinese sage Confucius called these
"ritual" and pointed out that it was a much more effective way of
governing man than laws were.
Even
insofar as we need government, remember that we are supposed to be
living in these United States. Our
Constitution (ya' know, that dead-letter thing) grants only "few and
defined" powers to the feds; most functions are meant to be performed by
the states. This is wise, as it accords with the Principle of
Subsidiarity. This states that the smallest unit of society that can
possibly perform a given function should be the one to do so. In other
words, if the family can handle a task, it shouldn't be the domain of a
larger entity; if the family can't but a Church or community
organization can, the task shouldn't be co-opted by the state government.
So-on and so-forth up the hierarchy of size.
In light of this principle and our
Constitution, how much of a "do-something" central government should we
want? It is not a local police force, which may have to patrol 24/7; or
a daddy and mommy, who are ever "on call." Most matters can be handled
by the multitude of entities, public and private, below Uncle Scam.
This may not please the self-important Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Ruth
Bader Ginsburg (let's not forget the federal government's largest court,
now), but we don't need Washington to be as bloated as their egos.
Remember that if Obama and the Congress had
spent enough time golfing, we wouldn't have a government takeover of
health care, bailouts and trillions more of unsustainable debt, new
taxes and a move toward European-style socialism. The problem is not
that our government officials spend too much time on the course. It's
that the nation is off course because, wherever our officials are, they
just aren't up to par.