The How And The What

IN GOVERNMENT there are two ways of looking at things: how you do things—the process and the image—and then there is the what, the actual policies and ideas that you implement in law and regulation.

President Obama ran as a how candidate, according to Kimberley A. Strassel. He wanted us to judge him on the way he was going to do things.

It was all about how he was going to do it — with bipartisanship and ethics and a new era of "responsibility." Now comes the reckoning. President Obama is being judged not on the what, but the how.

Well, it’s one thing for liberals to talk to themselves about ethics rules and process, and blow clouds of smoke about Hope and Change. But the truth is that government is about force. In our case, it is $5.5 trillion a year of force budgeted or estimated in FY09 at all levels of government, according to usgovernmentspending.com.

So the bottom line is that, what with the gigantic amounts of money swilling around in government, almost anyone who has had something to do with government has got their hands dirty. That creates problems when you advertise, as President Obama does, that all can be fixed with the proper process.

His first full day in office, Mr. Obama imposed the "most sweeping ethics reform in history," barring officials from working on issues on which they’d lobbied in recent years. Then came the realization that a lot of really smart people hadn’t just sat around for years waiting for him to give them government jobs, but had used their expertise for private profit.

You see, it doesn’t matter if you have the most ethical administration in history. If you are shoveling government spending out the door then people are going to lobby big time for a chunk of it. And the senators and congressmen and former senators and former congressmen are going to be right in the middle of all the wheeling and dealing, using their experience and their contacts to help their clients get a piece of the action.

This is what our liberal friends don’t understand. They think that because they are rational and compassionate that their ideas on politics and government programs are rational and compassionate. Put in a proper ethics reform and a few more billion dollars and money will start to flow to the areas with the greatest need.

But they are deluding themselves, of course. Politics is a competitive struggle for power between powerful men and women. The medium of exchange in this fight is government spending for programs. It is ultimately civil war by other means. For all that the language of politics is about helping people, the truth is that it is all about power. And anyone who thinks differently is deluding themselves.

That’s why I say that the welfare state is cruel, corrupt, wasteful, unjust, and the people who believe in it are deluded.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.