RAHM EMANUEL AND THE OMNIPRESENCE, AND OMNIPOTENCE, OF GOVERNMENT

 

5/26/21

 

Former Chicago Mayor and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, for whatever merits he might display as one of the last sober-minded Democrats of (in his case former) prominence in his Party, suffers from the same affliction that has burrowed its way into every Democrat and most Republicans in “public life,” to wit…everything starts, sustains itself, and ends with government.   While this is a troubling feature among Democrats, it is IN a Democrats’ nature to see everything through the public lens; the Democrats are, as we are seeing so demonstrably in the Biden Administration, the party of government, and the bigger the better.  However, this focus on government as the source of all that life has to offer is far more saddening among Republicans, who are supposed to the be the party of free enterprise.   Sadly, and long before Trump became the herald of the message of impatience with the marketplace and therefore the necessity of incessantly tinkering with said marketplace, those GOPers who had chosen to pursue “public service” had backgrounds remarkably similar to those of their Democratic rivals, backgrounds heavy with positions on the public payroll and bereft of experience in the private sector in which they purport to believe so fervently.   But I digress.

 

The point of this letter that I sent to the Wall Street Journal, and that the Journal published on April 27, is that Mr. Emanuel, who described himself in the cited article as a “sage,” is especially infected by this myopic view of the world, ascribing economic and financial cycles to the political parties that had so little to do with any of them:

 

 

4/21/21

 

Self-described “sage” Rahm Emanuel makes the same mistake as most other politicians and almost all Democrats, i.e., ascribing everything that goes on economically or financially in terms of the politics of the situation and the policies of those who have chosen politics as a lifelong profession.   (“Not Every ‘Serious Crisis’ Is Alike,” Opinion, 4/19/21)

 

Among many other such attributions, Mr. Emanuel talks about the “Republican recession” and “Democratic prosperity.” Mr. Emanuel does not consider for a moment that the aforementioned recessions could have been caused by things beyond the politicians’ control, such as, in the case of the recession Mr. Emanuel ascribes to Mr. Trump, the COVID pandemic, and, in the cases of the prosperity for which he credits Mr. Obama, however halting it might have been, market forces that in fact would have delivered stronger recoveries had it not been for government meddling.

 

One cannot blame Mr. Emanuel, who has spent his life in “public service,” for looking at everything through the lens of politics and the actions of the government; it is a trait endemic to those in his profession.  But neither should we be so willing to place such trust, and such enormous power, in the hands of people, even “sages” like Mr. Emanuel, with such a myopic view of the world.

 

 

Mark M. Quinn