What's Government Good For?

Leon Weiseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, ventures into the political arena with this article encouraging Obama to, in a word, be more liberal. If you’re someone who appreciates government’s role in society, you’ll love this sentence:

"I want the president to tell the American people that, contrary to what they have been taught for many years, government is a jewel of human association and an heirloom of human reason; that government, though it may do ill, does good; that a lot of the good that government does only it can do; that the size of government must be fitted to the size of its tasks, and so, for a polity such as ours, big government is the only government; that strong government comports well with strong freedom, unless Madison was wrong; that a government based on rights cannot exclude from its concern the adversities of the people who confer upon it its legitimacy, or consign their remediation to the charitable moods of a preferred and decadent few; that Ronald Reagan, when he proclaimed categorically, without exception or complication, that "government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem," was a fool; and that nobody was ever rescued, or enlarged, by being left alone."

Liberalism, at its heart, is about guaranteeing the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people. For liberals, government isn’t about suppressing liberty; it’s about ensuring opportunity.

Government will never be perfect, but as Weiseltier writes, “For all its grotesqueness, American government is a beautiful thing.”