{"id":5118,"date":"2010-08-31T07:41:56","date_gmt":"2010-08-31T11:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=5118"},"modified":"2010-08-31T07:41:56","modified_gmt":"2010-08-31T11:41:56","slug":"the-trust-problem-in-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/08\/31\/the-trust-problem-in-government\/","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;trust problem&#8221; in government"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefreemanonline.org\/headline\/too-little-trust\/\" target=\"_blank\">Charles Johnson<\/a> rebuts an article by E.J. Dionne which pushed the notion that Obama&#8217;s policies are significantly different from those of the Bush administration:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>There is one point where I can unequivocally agree with E.J. Dionne\u2019s column \u201cCan We Reverse the Tide on Government Distrust\u201d (<em>Washington Post<\/em>, May 6, 2010) &mdash; when he tells us that \u201cSo far, the Obama administration has missed the opportunity to demonstrate . . . how it is changing the way government works. How is its approach to . . . regulations different from what was done before? . . . How are its priorities different?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>How indeed?<\/p>\n<p>Two years in, if there\u2019s any noticeable difference between Bush\u2019s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, and Obama\u2019s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, I\u2019d like to know where to find it. The difference between me and E.J. Dionne is that Dionne is apparently surprised by this outcome &mdash; why hasn\u2019t Obama done better? At issue is what used to be called \u201cGood Government\u201d \u2013 the problem of ensuring that a centralized managerial State, with expansive powers to intervene in all matters economic, social, or hygienic, will be run cleanly, and competently, by qualified experts. Dionne insists that financial market meltdowns, oil spills, and coal-mine disasters reveal the catastrophic results of a few years of Bush-era government neglect. Those of us who remember the Bush administration may have a hard time accepting the claim that it was an era in which government was not doing enough; and we see these headline-grabbing catastrophes as only the tail end of a decades-long crisis &mdash; a bipartisan, politically created crisis of institutional incentives and industry \u201cbest practice-ism,\u201d created, nurtured, and protected by government itself.<\/p>\n<p>So when Dionne reviews a few headlines &mdash; the financial-market meltdown, the Gulf oil spill, the coal-mine explosion at Upper Big Branch &mdash; he suggests that \u201cIt\u2019s hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful \u2018big\u2019 government.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Really? Let\u2019s try.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Johnson rebuts an article by E.J. Dionne which pushed the notion that Obama&#8217;s policies are significantly different from those of the Bush administration: There is one point where I can unequivocally agree with E.J. Dionne\u2019s column \u201cCan We Reverse the Tide on Government Distrust\u201d (Washington Post, May 6, 2010) &mdash; when he tells us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,28,53,13],"tags":[158,71,379],"class_list":["post-5118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-debt","tag-stimulus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1ky","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5118"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5119,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118\/revisions\/5119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}