TECHNOCRAT BEATDOWN. That's the Theme of the Day. Start with Victor Davis Hanson, making the Trenchant Observation of the Day.

[W]hy cannot liberal defenders of Obama simply say, “Government, much more wisely than a selfish private sector, can ensure a vibrant economy. When people are assured of comprehensive government entitlements they use that security as a base for renewed work and investment. Deficits create consumer demands, spread money around to those who need it most, and spur economic prosperity. And when business provides society with over half its profits in income, payroll, and assorted state and local taxes, the resulting redistributive change and spread-the-wealth equality ensure aggregate economic growth”?

The Welfare Economics Paradigm itself is suspect. Here's Arthur C. Brooks preaching The Gospel According to St. Paul of Cambridge.

I’ll be slightly more academic here, and simply contrast what the government should do with what the government is doing—the things that frankly are driving Americans crazy, and leading a majority to say they believe the government itself is our nation’s greatest threat.

When we say that the government should concern itself with market failures, we are obviously acknowledging that markets are not perfect. Market failures can occur when we have monopolies, externalities (like pollution), public goods (fire protection, for example), and information problems (such as when people cheat others in the marketplace). Nearly all economists agree that these kinds of failures can justify some degree of state intervention. Furthermore, it is legitimate (in our view) for society to provide some minimum basic standard of living for all, and government has a role to play in that process.

What we do object to is when government so manifestly moves beyond these basic roles. And that is what is happening now. From “Cash-for-Clunkers” to the GM and Chrysler bailouts, our government is incurring trillions of dollars of new debt and enacting heavy-handed regulation on the business enterprises that could otherwise provide the way out of our current woes (and provide the taxes that make government programs possible in the first place). The truth is that current government actions are not correcting market failures.

I suppose one could subtitle the essay "A Policy Wonk's Response to Just Criticism." King Banaian suggests an apology is unnecessary.

But the knowledge problem in any Pigovian tax/subsidy scheme is to know how much to tax or subsidize. I sometimes worry Ryan and Brooks have not thought about this enough, because explaining it may cost them some of the 70%. That is not an excuse for not trying, though.

So much for the sherry and cookies. Best of the Web is ready to rumble.

By now it should be clear that the only new idea Obama introduced into American politics was the idea of Obama: Obama the voice of a new generation, Obama the brilliant technocrat, Obama the postracial leader.

The reality of Obama has been quite the opposite. The fresh-faced young leader has governed according to stale old ideas. The dazzling intellect has proved inadequate to basic managerial challenges. We haven't even been able to enjoy the achievement of having elected a black president, because so many of Obama's supporters (though not Obama himself, to his credit) won't shut up about how every criticism of the president and his policies is "racist."

Yet in America's current predicament, there is ample reason for optimism. We'd like to think that the failure of Obama's policies will discredit the bad economic ideas on which they're based, that his incompetence will discredit the notion that the cognitive elite should run the lives of everyone else, and that the phony charges of racism will discredit the long-outdated assumption of white guilt, at last bringing America close to the ideal of a colorblind society.

This is not to deny that the Obama presidency has been ruinous. But sometimes the costliest mistakes are those from which we learn the most.

That's still pretty tame stuff. Hockey season is near, and Shannon Love of Chicago Boyz wants to throw down.

And for all you middle-class Palins and Tea Partiers out there: You don’t have to take any guff from any pseudo-intellectuals. Tradition, common sense and real-world experience have proven to generate more accurate ideas than have babbling “intellectuals”. History might eventually judge you wrong about some things (gay marriage, perhaps), but in the end, when it comes to the big concepts, the concepts that keep societies free, prosperous and happy, history will most likely judge you correct.

On the other hand, Jeffrey Tucker (via Econ Log) encourages readers to thank Government technocrats for bedbugs, lukewarm showers, and office lighting that makes you look ill.

Are you seeing the pattern here? Government planning was never a good means to do anything, but at least there was a time when it set out to bring progress to humanity. It was the wrong means to achieve the right goal. Today, government planning is working as a maliciously effective means to achieve the wrong goal: I mean by this that if there is anything that government is actually good at doing, it is destroying things.

Even so, in seeking to reduce our standard of living and drive us backwards in the progress of civilization, the government really is playing with fire, unleashing evils that are unknown to us today.

Unknown and perhaps unknowable, complex adaptive systems being prone to do what they darn well please.