George Will argues here that since Obama won the election with nearly 53 percent of the popular vote, congressional Republicans should defer to him on the stimulus package–somewhat. He qualifies that deference by quoting Hayek:
The opposition’s third duty is to assert inconvenient truths, one
of which is that the truth shall make you modest. There never is a
moment when an open society that wants to remain such does not need the
wisdom of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who said:
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they
really know about what they imagine they can design.” So the deference
accorded this president should be proportional to his willingness to
acknowledge that neither he nor anyone else can know whether the
stimulus will work.And from the quantity of deference owed to him, Republicans
should subtract the sum of the opportunism of congressional Democrats.
If Republicans conclude that the truly stimulative portion of the
legislation is less than half the size of the portion composed of banal
and brazen opportunism, and irrelevant but consequential policies
surreptitiously pursued, they should oppose it.
