Politics & Power Quote by Donald Evans

The giveaway is the ventriloquism: Donald Evans doesn’t argue the case so much as channel it, laundering a contested economic ideology through the reassuring authority of “President Bush has said.” That opening clause signals discipline and alignment, a cabinet officer reinforcing message unity in an administration that treated economic policy as a kind of brand management. Repetition (“numerous occasions”) is doing political work too: if you’ve heard it often enough, it starts to sound like civic common sense rather than a choice.

“Government’s role” sounds modest, even restrained, but the verbs smuggle in a full agenda. To “create the conditions” is to move policy levers without naming them: tax cuts, deregulation, trade posture, labor rules, environmental enforcement. “Friendly environment” is the sugar coating, a phrase that implies warmth and hospitality while obscuring who gets welcomed and on what terms. Friendly to whom? Capital, explicitly. Not workers, not communities, not the environment, not democratic deliberation - capital, treated as the principal guest whose comfort determines the health of the household.

The subtext is a hierarchy of obligations: the state exists to court investment, and public policy should be judged by its attractiveness to mobile money. That framing is especially legible in the early 2000s, when the Bush administration pushed supply-side tax policy and lighter regulatory touch, selling it as growth rather than redistribution. Evans’ line is a clean example of how power speaks when it wants to sound neutral: government is cast not as a referee or a counterweight, but as a concierge.