Who Saves the Savior?

Am I the only one who finds irony in the following statement by David Axelrod?

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. "Part of being president is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast," he explained.

This person has spent an entire career promoting paternalistic politicians. Paternalism relies on the premise that individuals are incapable of caring for themselves and need central planners like Barack Obama to take care of them.

As Axelrod has now admitted (and pro-capitalist economists have known for ages), the goings-on of the government (let alone a nation of over three hundred million) are too much for one man to track. Perhaps it's time for us to reassess Axelrod's notion of what the government is supposed to be doing, and move towards individuals taking more responsibility for (and having more control over) their own lives.

Clearly one individual can't do this for all the other individuals.

That said, the alignment of Obama's political agenda with whom the IRS targeted is too convenient for Axelrod's argument, however true in general, to have a shred of credibility for this situation in particular. Even Barack Obama knows something about what his underlings are doing.

The man who ran as everyone's personal savior has no business pleading "I couldn't help it!" now. Oh. Barack Obama wasn't the one talking? Obama can't know what some random loose cannon like David Axelrod might choose to do? Well, then, let's see what Barack Obama says about the matter himself. 

-- CAV