Timothy Noah writes in Slate: “On March 15, I observed that in his new book, Taking Heat: The President, the Press, and My Years in the White House, Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary, scorned reporters for (among other sins) harboring a ‘belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation’s problems.’ As I noted then, it is impossible to conceive of any role for government that doesn’t involve solving some problems. A few libertarians wrote in to chide me and to say the only legitimate role for government was to provide a common defense, or to keep citizens from murdering one another, or some other bare-bones function. But what is the need to defend or police a society but a problem, for which government is the best, albeit imperfect, solution? I’ll repeat what I wrote two days ago: ‘We can argue about the particular problems government should solve, and about how successfully government addresses them at any given time, but not, I think, about whether government should be in the problem-solving business.’ If you still can’t follow this, see me after class.”

I have no particular desire to see Noah after class, but I don’t follow this–or rather, I don’t think it follows. First, I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to see an implied “all” in Fleischer’s “solve the nation’s problems,” which eliminates all of Noah’s objections. Second, let’s say one takes the view that government exists to prevent people from killing one another. I suppose one could try to redescribe this view in terms of problems and solutions: You could say that the government exists “to solve the problem that some people kill other people.” But that can’t be right. Nobody believes that this is, in fact, a problem that can be “solved.” It is a condition that has to be managed. It seems to me to be no offense to logic or language to think about matters this way, and Noah’s criticism on this point therefore strikes me as wrong.