Apparently our federal government is smart and getting even smarter.
That was the message of a largely overlooked presidential speech Monday, in which Barack Obama outlined a “new management agenda.” It starts with “recruiting some of the smartest people from the private sector to work side-by-side with some of the smartest people in the public sector.” The result of all this smartness coming together, naturally, will be smart government.
That’s the theory. The reality depends on what you mean by “smart.”
In everyday discourse, smart is a synonym for “bright” or “intelligent.” When used as an adjective for an inanimate object, most often we mean something that’s been around for a while but has been infused with technology that lets you get a lot more out of it than you used to.
For example, it could be the “smart phone” that allows you to take a snapshot of the kiddies with Mickey Mouse in Disney World and e-mail it instantly to their grandparents in Ohio. Or the “smart camera” with the “remove moving objects” features that lets you delete the guy who walked in front of you just as you snapped the otherwise perfect photo of your daughter collecting her Yale degree.
When President Obama uses “smart,” by contrast, it means something altogether different.
The first tipoff is the way he uses it. “This is not a Democratic idea or a Republican idea,” he once said. “This is just a smart idea.”
Whenever you hear those words, it’s a safe bet that what’s coming next is a Democratic idea. Not only that, but a liberal Democratic idea.
In this case, the president was talking about his energy policy, which consists of using your tax dollars to underwrite firms whose energy he prefers while preventing private companies from using their dollars to build, say, a pipeline that would transport a fuel — oil — he disdains.
In a similar way, when people like the president put “smart” before an object such as cars, they don’t mean it’s smart because the user can do more of what he wants with it. They mean it’s smart because it does what liberals want it to do and doesn’t do what they don’t want it to do, whether that means it runs on a certain fuel or can’t fit more than two people.
Sometimes, as he did on Monday, the president uses “smart” to describe people. Again he doesn’t mean simply being bright, or having the right credentials. He means someone who believes his smartness will lead directly to smart policies that make for smart government.
This is not a long leap. People such as our president generally start out with the belief their ideas are smart because they are smart. So they take for granted that government will be smart if led by, well, smart people like themselves.
There is, of course, an alternate view. In this view, just because the smart appointee in the Roosevelt Room thinks America ought to go all out for hybrid vehicles doesn’t necessarily make that a smart way to spend taxpayer dollars. Especially when people in the affected industry, who have more first-hand experience and are reading the same signals, are unwilling to invest their own money in these smart schemes absent a government subsidy or mandate.
In this view, the problem with government is not that it lacks smart people. The problem with government is that it doesn’t have the incentives to get the best out of smart people — and never will.
The reason Steve Jobs and not the Commerce Department came up with the iPhone is because Jobs had a market that priced the costs and benefits, as well as highly personal consequences for his decision, in the form of profits for success and losses for failure.
So we’re led to a paradox the president hasn’t yet addressed. In the market, the collective verdict that emerges from gazillions of voluntary exchanges results in an outcome smarter than the smartest individual involved. In sharp contrast, in government the collective schemes imposed by the smartest individuals almost always result in an outcome dumber than the dumbest member.
And that, my friends, is why only an administration that prides itself on being “smart” could give us the Chevy Volt, Solyndra and ObamaCare.
William McGurn is The Post’s editorial-page editor.