I’ve yet to see a small government conservative shrink the volume of government spending or the size of it’s workforce.
They mostly just replace teachers and safety inspectors and public sector engineers with cops and consultants and cronies.
Heres the fun part. They never actually shrink the government. They just cut spending on social programs that improve people’s lives and put the money into the military and the police.
small government means less taxes and regulations, so small government for corporations. it’s still big government for the people though.
meanwhile they say the other side is for big government when that’s the side that’s against government in your bedroom, government in your doctor’s office, government up your genitals, government establishing and dictating religion, government asking papers at every turn, a god-king president being above the law, and on and on…
bullshit terms made by people who want to control you and give their buddies more money.
In-groups to protect, outgroups to bind
Usually its tax cuts for the rich
Only thing cut is taxes for the rich and things that actually help people
There are people who, disturbed by “big government” today and its tendency to curb the advantages they might gain if their competitiveness were allowed free flow, demand “less govern- ment.” Alas, there is no such thing as less government, merely changes in government. If the libertarians had their way, the distant bureaucracy would vanish and the local bully would be in charge. Personally, I prefer the distant bureaucracy, which may not find me, over the local bully, who certainly will. And all historical precedent shows a change to localism to be for the worse.
—Isaac Asimov, Nice Guys Finish First, collected in The Sun Shines Bright, 1981
As anyone who has lived in a Rocky Mountain town can say, Distant bullies are pretty bad too.
But that’s a sort of unique situation. Or it was until Reagan. See, the entire Rocky Mountain range is treated as a sort of internal colony.
Resources are extracted, but the people who own the companies doing the extraction all pretty much live on one of the coasts.
And then every store is also owned by someone who lives on one of the coasts.
This means that any real wealth produced in those states, quickly leaves those states.
A lot of towns in the area never really had a “down town” in the first place, and with the creation of Walmart and such, no one else gets a downtown either.
The answer of course is a bigger government. But it has to be free of corporate influence.
Which might just take a very big government. Like expanding the House and Supreme Court big.
Both are desperately needed.
Whilst some money needs to be taken out of politics around lobbying and other stuff, small government is mostly an attack on that Government.
It’s anti-patriotism disguised as patriotism. Seeks to weaken the state, the nation, the people by depriving them of services and government owned revenue steams via privatization and theft of state assets by private industry.
Libertarians in a nutshell
And republicans
Hey can you explain this? I was recently looking into libertarian they seem to want a smaller gov. Does it just not at all shake out like that?
There’s a book “a libertarian walks into a bear” that examines a real life attempt to do libertarianism. It ends badly, with bears and fires, and the town does markedly worse than the neighboring town that did normal government stuff.
Also, someone pitching “smaller government” is going to need to define what they actually mean and why that’s a good thing. Gutting public education, for example, I think would be a very bad thing that someone might pursue in the interest of “smaller government”
Thanks for the explanation!
small governments cannot independently solve global crises.
They’re also only “small” when it comes to big corps wanting to do something exploitive, not for citizens rights
Its only function is to redirect money to private companies with relationships with small government officials.
What words start with earf?
There should be a businessman shoveling money into the government’s mouth
except it’s the other way around?
