Limited Government? No Thanks...

Many conservatives insist on the importance of having a smaller, more "limited" government. But what does that mean, really? In fact most people don't really want the government to be "smaller" in the sense of cutting back on the guarantees and regulations which have so benefited everyone over the past decades.

Law & Politics:

[T]he abstract narrative doesn’t fit with reality. I’ve argued before that Americans overwhelmingly favor “big” government – or more precisely, they have a set of priorities that they are unwilling to cut federal spending on (entitlements, for instance). You can label that however you want – “big” or “small” or anything in between. Thus, what we are actually fighting over are a few points in the marginal tax rate, along with the allocation of a small percentage of the overall federal budget. Don’t get me wrong, these small percentages have enormous consequences – but they won’t usher in an age of “big” or “small” government.

[P]eople forget both the conditions that existed before, and the struggle it took to make things better. I mean, think of all the things that you probably never even think about on a daily basis – clean water, sanitary food, parks in cities, the minimum wage, the weekend, the forty-hour work week, housing codes, fire codes, anti-discrimination laws, anti-child labor laws, national parks, state parks, Social Security, sanitation facilities, voting rights for women, public education, the interstate system. All of these resulted from government intervention – indeed, many of them were the fruits of decades-long efforts by the early Progressives. These benefits that people enjoy every single day of their lives did not pop up spontaneously from a benevolent free market, or from industry executives. They were created in spite of them – and over their sometimes fierce opposition.

[T]he reality of limited government is intolerable. Limited government stands silent in the face of a cruel Darwinian world where the strong prosper and the weak don’t. People don’t starve anymore, and that wasn’t true 100, or even 50 years ago. Government intervention has made this country a better place time and time again, and in ways that most people don’t even realize.

Life was better even for the poorest of Americans during the 1990s than during the 1890s. Why? Government intervention and regulation. Big government. This is a fact and it really isn’t deniable. Those who want “smaller” government should lay out in detail exactly what aspects of government they wish to do away with — if it includes any of the above, they should explain how they intend for the problems of the 1890s to be avoided. If they have no such plan, or at least no realistic plan, then their agenda should be denounced as unjust, unfair, and unworthy of any serious consideration.

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