My observations on President Obama’s inauguration speech picked up his strange claim that the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…

Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy goes into this matter with some energy:

Taken seriously, this argument leads to the rejection of any systematic constraints on government power. Why should we have a general presumption against government regulation of speech or religion? Why not instead support censorship when it "works" by improving the marketplace of ideas, and oppose it when it doesn’t? Think of all the misleading speech and religious charlatans that government regulation could potentially save us from!

The answer, of course, is that government regulation of speech and religion has systematic dangers that are not unique to any one particular regulation. Given those systematic flaws, it makes sense to have a general presumption against it…

Plus this:

The current spending bill before Congress is no exception. It is being marketed as a "stimulus." Yet only 8% of the new spending will occur this year, and only 41% in the next two years – too late to provide stimulus while the recession is still ongoing. This suggests that most of the new spending isn’t really about stimulus and has more to do with other policy priorities that are being misleadingly sold as emergency measures.

As Ilya points out, it all boils down to the simple yet profound Hayekian proposition that markets (millions of voters taking their everyday decisions) are necessarily better at distributing and acting on information than governments.

Government is in fact a way of sucking free-moving information out of society, to allow social engineering in the absence of that information.

Which is why one’s heart sinks to hear David Cameron talk at Davos about "placing the market within a moral framework".

What "moral framework" does government get placed in?

And one way or the other, who defines the ‘framework’ and does the ‘placing’?