By Mona Charen
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
The question many on the left are asking as they witness
the Obama administration flail in response to HealthCare.gov's debut disaster
is: How could this happen? Obama is so brilliant, so capable and so wise. How
could he bungle his signature initiative?
He isn't, but even if he were, it wouldn't make a
particle of difference. One of the central delusions of progressives is that
government is efficient and effective and that complex human societies are
amenable to centralized control and direction.
We on the right presume government ineptitude. The
Washington Post reports today, for example, that the federal employee
retirement system paid more than $400 million in benefits over the past few
years to deceased retirees. On the same page, we learn that despite the U.S.
government's $7 billion investment in combatting heroin cultivation in
Afghanistan, the trade is booming. Last week, the Brookings Institution
published a study suggesting that Cash for Clunkers was a failure, costing
taxpayers $1.4 million for each of the 3,676 jobs created.
This is normal. There are common sense reasons for it --
explanations available to most students of Econ 101. Those spending other
people's money have very little incentive to economize or seek top value. Nor
can central bureaucrats possibly have enough information to make wise decisions
about something as complex as one-sixth of a $16 trillion economy. As Friedich
A. Hayek cautioned: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to
men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
Discovering that government lacks competence in many
areas is what caused a critical group of liberal intellectuals to become the
"neo-conservatives" in the 1970s and 1980s. Irving Kristol, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Novak and others were not moved
only by anti-Communism. They were first chastened by studying the failures of
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
As for the other story of the past month: as to the
media's discovery that Obama is untruthful, we conservatives are adamantly
unshocked.
Observing the left's confusion about the emperor's lack
of clothes is perhaps a clarifying moment. Liberal journalists who until now
had covered for Barack Obama, rationalized his failures, explained away his
misrepresentations, and believed in his integrity seem shaken. The "If you
like your plan, you can keep your plan" vow was so clearly a blatant lie
that even the Praetorian Guard of White House correspondents is reporting on it
accurately.
Since the armor now has sunlight streaming through it,
perhaps the fifth estate will re-examine other pivotal moments of the Obama
years girded with their newly acquired skepticism.
Start with Benghazi. "60 Minutes" has revisited
the story. It's more than a year late, but come on in, the water's fine. There
were so many lies told about Benghazi that investigative reporters could be
kept busy for years tracking them all. The president of the United States
maintained for two weeks after the attack that he couldn't possibly say whether
it was terrorism or not, though the CIA acknowledged that it knew within hours
that the attack was planned and coordinated. President Obama and Secretary of
State Hilary Clinton blamed the attack on an Internet video that "insulted
the Prophet," so as to avoid criticism for failing to provide security and
to prevent the press from interpreting the Benghazi attack as a refutation of
Obama's claim that al-Qaida was essentially defeated. Those were not shadings
of the truth or diplomatic doublespeak. They were lies.
The president also claimed that he ordered that
everything possible be done to save the Americans who were under attack. Yet no
one has ever seen such an order. The press hasn't bothered to ask for evidence
of it. Perhaps they trusted his word. Do they still? Are they not curious about
why the administration did nothing to come to the aid of Americans under fire?
Beyond the lies, that is a scandalous breach of trust, as is the president's
promise -- uttered with campaign-inflected intensity -- to find the people who
killed four Americans "because one of the things that I've said throughout
my presidency is when folks mess with Americans, we go after them."
It's been 14 months. Is this government incompetence or
another lie? Someone should ask.
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