Writes Don Watkins, a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and Yaron Brook its president in Government tries to do too much: Opposing view:
Is today’s government dysfunctional? Of course. But not because it can’t get things done. The problem is that it does so many things that it shouldn’t.
Happiness, prosperity and innovation aren’t gifts from politicians. They are achievements of the free human mind. We need government to protect that freedom. When it instead tramples on individual rights in pursuit of whatever politicians feel is in the public interest, it abandons defined limits and becomes an enemy of freedom and progress.
The op-ed then goes on to list a plethora of government interventions which have nothing to do with protecting individual rights.
The question we need to ask, however, is not whether the government should do more or less, but what should it do.
For our money, that answer has already been supplied by thinkers such as Ayn Rand and the Founding Fathers.
“The sum of good government,” said Thomas Jefferson, is “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
