Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, in the Great Hall of the Purdue Memorial Union, December 2016 (Purdue University / Mark Simons)

On the homepage today, we publish the last in my three-part series on Mitch Daniels: here. In this installment, I have him quoting Jim Edgar, who was governor of Illinois during most of the 1990s: “Good government is boring.” True, says Daniels — although I recall a phrase used by George Will, when he introduced Daniels before a big speech in 2011. There is such a thing as a “charisma of competence.”


In conversation with me, Daniels noted that people have different views about government: Some like it small, limited, and lean (“That government is best which governs least”); some like it big and intrusive. But whatever you like, you should want government to do what it does well.

“I was always preaching this to our folks in the state administration,” Daniels said. (He was governor of Indiana from 2005 to 2013.) “One reason to do things well is that people paid for them, and they deserve it. A second reason is, we want them to have confidence. If we can actually get you in and out of a Bureau of Motor Vehicles branch in under ten or twelve minutes; if we send you your tax refund in a week or two, rather than months; if we can build the roads we promised to build and never did — it will build public confidence that the gang can occasionally shoot straight. Then, when we come along with the next suggestion, people may listen to us a little more intently.”

As I mentioned in a post earlier this month, a lot of people are busy planning our future — people on left and right. Socialists, nationalists, populists, post-liberals, integralists, anti-Frenchists, common-gooders. Planning, planning, planning. They want the government to do more and lift up our lives. Great.


But one question all of us might ask is: How are the politicians and planners doing with the work they have assigned themselves already? How about the budget and the debt and entitlements? How’s the VA running? And the Post Office? Etc. How is the government doing with the work it has taken on already? Is it really ready for more?

These are questions that a responsible, self-governing citizenry must ask. Government should clean up its own house (or House). It should learn to tie its shoes, or relearn it. Government, Hippocratically, should first do no harm. Otherwise, sit the hell down, you know?