By Selwyn Duke
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 (PBUH) to play as much golf as possible even if we taxpayers must pay his
greens fees.
This isn’t just because Obama’s (PBUH) 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 (PBUH); it
is a larger one. When you scrape away
the effort to score political points and the fact that Obama (PBUH) 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 (PBUH) 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.
This article first appeared at American Thinker
© 2010 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved
