Dear Mr. Biden: Vice Presidents Were Meant to Be Seen, Not Heard

Vice President Joe Biden claims: “Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.”

I believe that Adam Smith wrote a very accurate description of Mr. Biden in the 18th century (before government vision and incentives too!):

The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them…

…in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

(Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759)

Would Mr. Biden like to also step up and claim credit for the following government achievements too?

Roosevelt’s Japanese internment camps, legitimacy of slavery in the world, inflation, war after war after war, Jim Crow laws, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, corporate welfare and bailouts, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Hitler’s Holocaust (12 million dead), Stalin’s Soviet Union (20 million dead), Mao’s Communist China (40 million dead), Kim Jong Il’s North Korea (body count still in progress), Chavez’s Venezuela (a.k.a. Titanic), Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, the suppression of liberty. I could go on and on…

Mr. Biden, I find your vanity and conceit to be overwhelming.