The Federal Department of Economic Recovery

The biggest evasion of Obama's speech is that he is hiding what is essentially an ideological program—a resurrection of the ghost of socialism—as a rejection of ideology. He warns us that we must not "rely on the worn-out dogmas of the past" (by which he means free-market economics) and he calls on both parties (by which he means Republicans) "to put good ideas ahead of the old ideological battles."

Yet it is not easy to guess Obama's own basic ideological commitment: that "only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy."

Obama's premise is that only government can guide and manage economic activity. Only a Federal Department of Economic Recovery can bring back prosperity. This is the most ideological of ideological positions, an "ism." The name for it is "statism," a belief in the central role of the state in controlling the economy.

I am most definitely not an opponent of "ideology." Ideas and principles can capture important truths, and those basic truths become even more necessary in an emergency, not less. The principles of individual rights and free-market economics, for example, would help us to remember the supremacy of the individual over the state and the moral and practical superiority of a free economy over central planning—the hard-won lessons of the past century. These principles would help us to understand how government got us into this crisis and how we can get out of it.

But of course there are other ideas that are "worn-out dogmas" that have demonstrated their failure again and again. And those are the statist ideas that social democrats are now trying to revive...

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