David Brooks Quotes
Government is operating under uncertainty
Government officials are not clairvoyant and cannot foretell the future, So all government policies and programs are created and managed with some uncertainty. Some conservatives complain that business in order to thrive needs to have certainty. However, if businesses had certainty in what they did, few would ever lose money or fail. Brooks explained that there is no way any government can supply certainty even about its own policies and programs unless it is willing to give up the option of dealing with any unexpected circumstances.
David Brooks, Political Journalist & Columnist, PBS News Hour, May 4, 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Many corporate executives were claiming that they were not investing in growth and jobs because they were uncertain about the future tax rates or regulatory environment with which they would be coping. But with elections coming up, there has never been such certainty, and much of the best growth in American business was in the Clinton administration where these policies were under constant debate. Immelt identified the real problem: Demand for products and services was very weak.
Most Americans believe that the discovery of the inferiority of government operations compared to the businesses world was made in the latter part of the 20th century. But here is a famous Englishman in 1891 telling the world in his publication.
Many people think that as a New Deal Democrat, she did not consider inflation as a major problem. However, she did, and this is but one example.
March 4, 1933 was the date that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had assumed the Presidency from Herbert Hoover and used government to combat the Great Depression whereas Hoover would not take any of these steps as the conservative wing of his party and he regarded anything that government did was “creeping socialism”. Historically, it is useful to recall what steps Roosevelt took that were described as socialism. These include Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance for bank accounts, aid to farmers, the Civilian Conservation Corps, Regulation of the stock market, regulation of banks and many other things that are key elements of modern capitalism which virtually every capitalistic nations has in one form or another. Long after Truman was out of office, the most conservative elements of the Republican Party have accused every Democratic President of “creeping socialism” when they were actually quite opposed to socialism. Even when their career before their presidency was full of criticisms of socialism and policies that are opposite, as in the case of President Obama, the President has been accused of being a socialist. However, it started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.
David Brooks is a conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. He has worked as a film critic for The Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and the PBS NewsHour.
