Considering it's exactly the government's services that allow so many people to become rich, I find this statement completely ridiculous. Do you think that we'd have as much trade/commerce if we didn't have roads? Do you think that our financial system would work without the laws/regulations put in place to protect traders/investors/etc.?
I'd prefer they had precisely enough power and money to dish out to paint the double yellow lines down the middle of the street, with no chance of appeal or review.
But, many of my fellow Americans believe these jackasses should be empowered to run something called 'The Economy,' so they end up getting a little more than that, because it is hard to run them when we keep calling them an it.
Remember when they told us that the function of government was to prevent monopolies?
We weren't paying attention to the detals, and instead of serving as the people's monopoly cops, government took it on itself to create monopolies in the marketplace, to pick winners and losers, to enact massive OneSizeFitsAll visions of what The Marketplace in The Economy should be.
Their legitimate job is to enforce fair banking and lending laws, (and not define 'fairness' based only on quotas or numbers or pet soc grad school theories, but actual objective evidence of discrimination.) Their legitimate job is to enforce antidiscrimination laws. Their job is to regulate commerce, ie, make it regular. Weights and standards and practices. Their job is not to pick winners and losers from among their crony friends and favorite special interest groups, or to run markets, or to run social experiments, or to redistribute income, or to target quintile economic statistics in mythical entities called 'quintiles.'
We build an incredibly fucked up world when we set out to subsidize failure and punish success in the name of 'managing outcomes.' Constructivist economies building has failed miserably, and all that is going on now -- by both Democratic and Repuiblican constructivists -- is a frantic effort to spraypaint our current constructivist failure as other than a Pink Slip for the whole idea of THE ECONOMY RUNNING.