Politics & Power Quote by Bob Schaffer

Small-government rhetoric rarely sounds so innocent. "The first thing the federal government can do to help is get out of the way" turns "help" into a paradox: the state serves you best by disappearing. That inversion is the line's key move. It borrows the moral glow of assistance while smuggling in an ideological verdict that regulation, spending, and oversight are not merely imperfect tools but presumptively harmful obstacles.

Schaffer's phrasing also plays a clever game with sequencing. "The first thing" implies there may be second and third steps, but it quietly forecloses them; once government is framed as the problem, every additional action becomes suspect. The sentence is built for applause because it flatters listeners as competent, self-governing adults and casts frustration with bureaucracy as a kind of common sense rather than a political choice.

The subtext is classically American: prosperity is natural, entrepreneurship is fragile, and federal intervention is the grit in the gears. It's a claim often made during fights over taxes, environmental rules, education standards, or health policy - arenas where "getting out of the way" doesn't mean absence so much as shifting power. When Washington retreats, someone else fills the vacuum: state governments, employers, insurers, landlords, private contractors. The line invites you to treat those forces as neutral or benign, and federal power as uniquely coercive.

Its punch comes from moral simplicity. It doesn't argue policy; it argues character: leave people alone, and they'll do the right thing. That certainty is the sales pitch.