Ambrose: Obama gets it backwards

You're listening to Barack Obama's inaugural, and yes, it is a splendid moment in American history, the adulation is very nearly palpable and it is impossible not to be affected,. One thought nevertheless keeps nagging at you. On some of the most pressing issues of the day, this speech has things absolutely backwards.
The new president tells us quite correctly that the market is a freedom-spreading, enriching force, quickly adding, however, that it can spin out of control if not closely watched. He has just a moment earlier pronounced arguments against big government as stale and inapplicable to the concerns of the moment, explaining that the real issue is what does or does not work.
But, of course, the fear being expressed by some of those keeping their heads in this dire hour is that it's the government in danger of spinning out of control. Historian Paul Kennedy of Yale University worries in a Wall Street Journal piece about how enormous indebtedness could further prompt our end days as a great power, just as it has done with other powers in the past.
He wonders who will buy the Treasury bonds to finance the debt -- China? And if it does, doesn't that bring about a great swing in who is who in the financial world?
Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute notes in an opinion article how a major stimulus package could swell the 2009 deficit to $1.7 trillion, and puts that in perspective, noting it would be enough money to send 17 million households $100,000 each, that it would be three times the deficit just a year earlier and would also be equal to the entire federal budget no longer ago than the year 2000.
Hassett doesn't see us getting off this horse once we start riding it, and predicts that in the absence of a watchful commission, we could be facing either the collapse of the dollar or a devastating tax hike.
Another way big government could spin out of control is trying too hard to keep the market in tow. If the federal government decides it can somehow forever forestall any future boom-and-bust panics by minute, ironclad, universally stringent regulation far exceeding the hundreds of thousands of pages of rules already in existence, a number of positive American attributes praised by Obama in his speech will in effect be bound up in chains. Then forget opportunity for all.
That idea, a great idea, was also in his speech as he told us that it is not just growing gross domestic product that matters, but whether any American willing to work ought to have a chance to partake in the national prosperity. If you use the correct analytical tools, you find they pretty much do.
Those tools are studies that keep up with the income of individuals over long periods of time, and they show most Americans do leap from one economic class to higher ones over the course of their lives. A prime reason is not an economic system managed to the nth degree by Washington, but one that has so far remained dynamic and does keep producing more and more wealth.
The argument for limited government is not some old-fashioned thing that should be forgotten -- the government played a major role in bringing about the moment's crisis by urging banks to extend loans to bad risks, and overregulation could be a huge headache for Obama's massive infrastructure plan. Just wait until all those projects he has in mind are stalled endlessly by rules meant to please environmental activists insisting that excess is actually just ordinary prudence.
Obama preaches pragmatism, and I like that as long as it is a pragmatism that looks to long-term consequences and appreciates the historically validated value of certain basic principles. If it doesn't, the adulation of a special January day may not last.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)

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