Having Your Cake

"Innovation has been essential to our prosperity in the past, and it will be essential to our prosperity in the future,"

-President Barack Obama

As I believe that I am free to criticize our nation's leaders and leadership, I also feel it only fair to compliment them when they are deserving of it. The above statement, made by the President during his weekly radio talk yesterday, is such an example. American innovation has driven many of the projects which have made our country what she is today: a model for the rest of the world to, hopefully, emulate. Still, his words would resonate more deeply and profoundly if he would take the next necessary step: get Washington out of the way so that innovation may roam free in solving our problems.

"Necessity is the mother of invention," the great philosopher Plato, one of those dead white guys we hear so little about in our enlightened age, opined about 400 years before Christ. To wit, when something is needed, someone will find the thing to fill the void. If, that very big word, if the forces of human nature are allowed to find it.

"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government," the famed economist Milton Friedman has pointed out. The President seems to believe otherwise as he works incessantly to see that our federal government takes over the major industries of the United States. What possible freedom of movement, freedom to innovate, can come from a group of bureaucrats, who, no matter what the assure us, cannot know an industry like the people within it generally do?

I could go on, but I think the point is made. President Obama, so long as he continues down his current path, speaks with forked tongue. He cannot call for innovation and act towards centralization at the same and expect good results. The innovators will not trust him and the controllers will resent him. It is this type of thinking, a lack of philosophic understanding and commitment, which will doom him in the long run.

Sadly, he apparently means to take us down the path with him.