The best analogy for Romney's skills-Danny DiVito from Other people's money.

[Baruch Menachem]

Interesting and lively article giving a lukewarm 'meh' discusion of Romney's skill set by Jonah Goldberg.

Jonah's argument, which I totally agree with, is that it is not the business of government to provide jobs. Sensible government provides the environment in which private enterprise creates jobs. Government does roads, jails, courts and the military which protect the people from the predators. In this environment people with passions and skills divide up the labor and make things and do things that help each other for a price.


The central problem with the Government is they do too many things badly. Just like the mega corps of the 70s which got streamlined in the 80's, removing the bloat and focusing on what they should be doing made lots of folks very rich.

The same thing should be done with the government.

If you don’t think government is more bloated than Dom DeLuise with an allergic shellfish reaction, you simply haven’t been paying attention. Yes, regulations hurt the private sector, but they also hamper the public sector, making it impossible for it to do what it should. The government that built the Pentagon in 16 months would probably need at least that long just to get a meeting with the EPA today.

Why did President Obama have to spend billions to discover that there’s no such thing as shovel-ready jobs? Not because there aren’t enough workers eager to pick up shovels and paychecks, but because there aren’t nearly enough bureaucrats willing to put down their clipboards.

A Government Accounting Office study last year found that more than 100 programs deal with surface transportation, 82 monitor teacher quality, 47 manage job-training programs, nearly two dozen offices or programs deal with homelessness, and some 15 agencies or offices handle food safety. Five outfits focus on getting the feds to use less gasoline. Maybe they should carpool?

In addition, of course, there is the GAO making studies of government wasting time and money.

How does this translate into making Romney an attractive candidate. I don't believe there is really a way to do that. If the best you can say about him is that Danny DaVito played him in a movie, that is less than an endorsement.

 

[eflatminor]

A Government Accounting Office study last year found that more than 100 programs deal with surface transportation, 82 monitor teacher quality, 47 manage job-training programs, nearly two dozen offices or programs deal with homelessness, and some 15 agencies or offices handle food safety.

Anyone really believe all these agencies actually have a positive impact on areas in which they oversee? I'd bet money that if you eliminated all of them, nobody would know the difference.

 

[Baruch Menachem]

The people working in them would

 

[Decepticon]

Yes, no jobs were ever created by the government. Why you can count on one hand the jobs created by the government building the interstate highway system, or dumping money into universities to develop the microprocessor which we needed to go to the moon, or the internet. Yup...no jobs there at all.

Yup...government has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with job creation. So we better not subsidize solar power to the tune of 1/5th of what we subsidize oil at and instead shrink government's influence by deregulation because it's worked out so well and we're all so prosperous with lots of jobs and raises, since the era of Reagan.

 

[Baruch Menachem]

The job of the government is to build the road so that commerce can take place between two places. It should not involve itself in the commerce.

Private schools do better on average than public ones, but public ones are still necessary to agreed on public functions.