Jimmy Carter is bad enough,

but when Amity Shlaes says you're threatening to repeat FDR's economic missteps, you might consider firing all of your advisers and start finding ways to cut public spending. If you still think FDR was an economic genius, you need to read her book, The Forgotten Man.

Too many economists talk in a kind of argot that normal people don't understand, but we can understand that government is not a profitable enterprise, except for private businesses who manipulate it for competitive advantage. Wealth is what everybody else creates and pays taxes on. Government is a necessary evil that needs to be minimized and restricted to those functions that are necessary, such as defense of the nation, guaranteeing freedom to compete fairly and protecting the rights of citizens both individual and collective. I can see the need to conduct foreign policy, regulating commerce (under which I would expect prohibitions of boycotts by individual states and municipalities of each other and of political subdivisions offering refuge to violators of national laws) and protecting our borders, which seems a self-evident part of national defense.