One nation under nanny.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

President Obama came to town a few weeks ago, and much levity ensued. But I might be the only person who found anything funny about the president's visit to the Triangle, during which he toured a manufacturing plant and met with his Jobs and Competitiveness Council for a status report. (The job market is still code blue, by the way. But you don't need a presidential council to explain that.) Meanwhile, Obama's top economic adviser, also in town, affixed a concerned look on his face and nodded in sympathy as executives explained all the methods by which the administration could help business get back on track--by getting out of the way, for instance. And just a few miles away, Gov. Beverly Perdue and the legislature were at odds over the state budget, which the governor declared was insufficient in the way of taxes and would cause jobs to be lost if people weren't compelled to put more money on the table to keep state workers employed. So why laugh, even if it was laughter born of irony and derision? Because the alternative is despair.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I'm not one of those who believe today's politicians are uniquely craven and inept and that the system of governance is more dysfunctional than ever. My guess is that politicians have always caused people to gnash their teeth in frustration and that the system has always operated at near-maximum inefficiency. Two things are different these days, though.

First, government at all levels has metastasized into a lurking, intrusive presence in your daily existence. In the beginning, government existed solely to provide services--mail delivery, an orderly court system, defense of the nation--and build things such as roads, dams, schools, water systems and sewage-treatment plants. But elected officials, local, state and federal, kept assigning themselves more duties. Those additional responsibilities have ranged from the noble, such as looking after the poor, to the absurd: nagging citizens about their eating habits, licensing marriages, regulating nail salons and declaring jihad on the garbage disposals under your kitchen sink. (That last one actually happened in my city a couple of years ago. The disposals won.) The idea that government should perform a few important tasks well and efficiently, and otherwise leave us alone, is long gone. Politicians and bureaucrats are on an endless search for things to fix, regulate, control or tax. Worse yet, hardly any problem is ever solved. They're just...