Obama wants less college drop-outs. Focus on Outcome. Is "outcome" a piece of paper? That is easily done: High Schools do it every day.
Why don’t people live within their means, and save for a rainy day? A teed-off  Sowell.
The 1…

Hearts and minds: worth $0

Weather & communications satellites: sitting here in my chair, I just thought up a theory about how this could have been privatized, therefore it was a bad idea.

The impulse to “do something” is one thing, but going overboard is quite another. Obama wants to do lots of things so he can be heroically remembered for doing lots of things; he doesn't care if those things actually make the country a worse place.

I think Obama also knows full well that this is a perfect opportunity to drastically increase the size and scope of government, and he is doing all he can to make this happen. He knows that doing so shifts the baseline, and that the size of government never shrinks back to its former size. He sees what the New Deal did for Big Government, and he's trying to make it happen again.

Obama is not an idiot, but very clever actually. He talked like a moderate on the campaign, but he's in full progressive/socialist mode in office. Has he chosen to support bad policies? Yes. Is what he's doing immoral? I think so, because I find collectivism to be immoral. Is he an idiot? No.

That probably means that Obama and his advisers are just as isolated from reality as Bush and his gang used to be.

It would be interesting if opposition parties presented some sort of counter plan as an alternative for the American people. The constant and counterproductive railing on the Obama plan is wearing thin on most people's patience. To be clear, I would not mind productive railing.

Happy accident though.

- I like it that we have national monuments we can be proud of. The government uses guns to extract money from people in order to build and maintain these monuments – awesome! More please!
- We have a presidential inauguration that costs a lot of money, extracted from people in the same fashion.
- The moon landing showed the world what capitalist democracy can achieve. It makes me proud of my country. It cost a lot of money, and I'm glad the government used force to extract it from hard-working Americans, including heroic entrepreneurs and libertarians.

Even people who only admit to the existence of profit and loss – the small-minded – have to chip in for the less-tangible efforts to keep the American meme going. To aide in the spread of western values and ultimately push the world forward.

Your ideological predecessors no doubt predicted ruin and squalor should we pursue national projects like the moon landing, but here we are – doing pretty well (I say that without irony).

Actually I think not taking grand, non-quantifiable visions seriously is a feature, not a bug.

There's some real libertarianism, the autism in all its glory.

- historical figures judged against theoretically perfect counterfactuals only knowable in hindsight
- then you have WW2 and the moon. This is the autism. Your value system is fatally crippled if you can't think beyond economics, about winning the war of ideas and ideals. Your value system argues against just about every substantive, historical classically liberal action that got the west to where it is today. It zeroes out the value of Russian and Jewish lives, their cultural and national traditions. When the colonists were gearing up to kick the Brits out, you would be the ones arguing against it on bean-counting “principle”.

Grand, non-quantifiable vision, ala Paine, scares you – you can only deal in the small-bore.