Obama: How Much Government Do You Want?

President Obama made the case this weekend that there's a certain, shall we say, lack of consistency in attitudes toward government in general and and reaction to the Gulf oil spill in particular. Here he is in a Politico interview:

I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.

And there's more:

Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying '"do something" are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much. Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.

Many Americans say they don't like big government, but almost all Americans want effective government -- particularly a government that handles all manner of disasters and crises with dispatch. The problem is that it's hard to do that -- not to mention all the other routine jobs we expect government to handle, from air traffic control to food safety inspection -- without a very large government.