Let us put this illustrious trio at Point A, a circle in the middle of a vast plain. Let us posit (I am scarcely a story-teller, so feel free to soup it up if you retell it) that they are trying to reach a Point B, one hundred miles due North. Let us say this point represents global peace, prosperity, liberty, and contentedness.
At Time A, the Hare sets off due South. The tortoise sets off due North. Sleepy the Dwarf feels drowsiness overcome him, and he lays down right where he is and takes a nap. The Hare travels at four times the rate of the tortoise. He is efficient. He works hard. He has a plan.
After a day, the hare has travelled 30 miles. The tortoise has travelled 7.5 miles, and Sleepy hasn’t travelled at all. The race would seem to be to the Hare, but he is travelling in the WRONG DIRECTION. In point of fact, Sleepy the Dwarf, having done nothing, is thirty miles closer to the destination than the Hare. The Hare, despite having worked harder than any of them, is the farthest away.
Consider the work it took to completely ruin/rework the Russian and Chinese nations. Millions were killed. Millions were displaced. Mass starvation was endured, human rights were eradicated. Unions were banned, and working conditions were uniformly awful. And all of this took a lot of EFFORT.
Do you understand this? Communist officials, many of them, probably worked 16 hour days for years making this happen. And for what? For failure. For results that would have been achieved sooner and better had they contented themselves with playing chess and collecting mushrooms.
Laissez Faire does not mean “do nothing”. It means “let the locus of activity be among free people incented to innovate by the profit motive, and by their creative spirits.”
We kept seeing this idea that Obama had to “do something”. The same thing was said of FDR. Yet, doing something can be counterproductive. If you are doing the wrong thing, you are travelling backwards, like our idiotic Hare.
There are some 350 million people in this country. Some 200 million of them get up and do SOMETHING all day, every day of the week. Of those, some 200,000, say, have to make decisions every day: do they hire or fire people? Do they expand or contract the business? Do they open up new product lines or shut some down? This activity happens whether or not the President or Congress do “something” or not.
The effect Congress and the President have is on the actual decisions MADE. If people are afraid, they err in the direction of safety, which means less jobs, less growth, less tax revenue, and economic stagnation. This is what has happened in the last two years.
I have said this often, but we would quite literally be better off if the office of the President of the United States were occupied by some zoo animal that did nothing but eat leaves and branches all day. This time, let’s make it a koala. We could erect eucalyptus trees in the Oval Office. We could get periodic reports as to the status of the President’s health. Maybe we could even get some koala children. That would make for fun news.
The Secretary of Defense would be fully equal to protecting us, and we wouldn’t have any Czars at all. We could mostly do a whole lot of nothing.
This would be much, much better than what we have today. Businesspeople would not have to factor in a lunatic socialist’s policy proposals when making their decisions.
My take? No Obama, we would be down to 6% unemployment or so, and our national security would be at least as good as it is, and probably better.
For my part, I would like to encourage the President to spend more time golfing, napping, or picnicing–sailing, canoeing, horseback riding–somewhere with Michelle and the kids, and less time trying to “help” us.