The benefits of commentary

For me the benefit of restricting myself to commentary to other sites is that it helps to distill important ideas that I would normally present in a longer, more complex, blog post.

No one reads those beyond the few and dedicated that basically got the idea some years ago.

That is why I pluck my commentary from other sites and repost those with some added commentary, like what you are reading now, to help shine a light on the basic concept.

Thus for the idea of what the problem is with the federal government, can often be stated in someone else's stream of thought even if they aren't addressing the problem, directly.  Thusly reading through the latest page on Hot Air about the so-called 'debates' in the Republican Party hosted by CNN (which went all high-techy and I dutifully ignored as debates are turning into 'gotcha' forums), I ran across a comment that hosted the nub of the problem but was directed to finding an experienced 'manager' for the government.  My point is as follows, with warts and all and I'll try to put down my formatting problems as-is, also, for your copious amusement:

[..]Today the United States federal government is the world’s largest enterprise. Only China, Japan, and India have total GDPs larger than our federal budget. [..]

Adjoran on June 14, 2011 at 3:31 AM

Sorry to do a pull-out from a longer paragraph, but you have stated the problem to a T with that.

The federal government should in no way, shape or form be that large outside of a global war, and then it should only be that large as long as hostilities are going on and then fall back to a tiny size thereafter.

It shouldn’t require a very good or excellent executive to manage the thing. And we should be able to survive electing a dipstick with no experience by that said dipstick not being able to get his or her hands on so much cash and power. The size is the thing that is dangerous, not the experience, or lack thereof, of a candidate or official.

When we have a federal government large enough so that such in-depth experience matters, then we are in a bind as any single experienced mistake will destroy us. The idea now is to get someone who will reduce the size, scope and power of the government and get it out of our lives so we can survive mediocrity. Because, lets face it, most of our elected officials are reflective of the body politic and it is mediocre at best and awful for its norm.

Stop looking for geniuses and start looking at the problem.

ajacksonian on June 14, 2011 at 7:35 AM

Close enough, Hot Air does something funky with a line before blockquotes to differentiate them.

The problem is that those who are partisans are looking for geniuses.

The problem is the size, scope and power of government which now consumes a huge amount of our economy.

I'm looking for someone to put government back in its place as something that can and should be outside of our daily lives save at the most local of levels.

I'm looking for a dedicated problem-solver for reducing the problem of the huge size of government, not an awesome manager of an authoritarian State, which means I'm not a Republican.

I'm a Jacksonian.

See how that works?