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Small Government?

Bikewer

Penultimate Amazing
Bikewer
Joined
Sep 12, 2003
Messages
13,242
Location
St. Louis, Mo.
Conservative Republicans in general, and the "Tea Party" crowd as well, go on and on about "small government" being a major goal for their brand of conservatism.

Just what goal do they have in mind? I know that the extreme right, the Libertarian-leaning types, would just as soon have almost none at all. This seems at best a pipe-dream...

What in reality do these folks expect? Most of "government" is pretty well settled by long-established departments and staffed by career bureaucrats. Would all these folks be out on their ear? Since the government is a very large portion of the employment sector, this doesn't seem like a good idea when we have 10% unemployment...
Would major governmental agencies and departments be simply abolished or unfunded?

With the scarily-apparent results of regulatory failure still so strongly with us, do these folks still seriously believe in abolishing all of that "growth-stifling" regulation and regulatory agencies?
I'm curious. What would the "small government" look like?
 
Well the COMPLETLY unfounded and IDIOTIC meme of the right is that if all those bureaucrat types were gone than business could function as the ALMIGHTY intended it to be and then those people would find REAL work or starve to death, I guess, and decrease the surplus population.
 
they want a laissez-faire economy, where rich fat-cats can trample on the rights of their workers, there are no environmental regulations, lots of corporate welfare, etc etc.

they also want to be able to own an automatic 50 caliber rifle. and a tank. and they want all gays to be locked up.

you know. paradise.

:)
 
Let me. They got theirs and want no one else to get a taste. They would like the poor to live in shanty towns, because the poor should be poor. But lets make sure those shanty towns are far away from them. They want an Ayn Rand fantasy world sans the atheism, because Dominionism is the bee's knees.

Oh but you have to have a strong military to protect their interests...even though that is a contradiction with the call for a small government.
 
Conservatives believe in pre-destination. If you're born poor, its cause God wanted you to be that way.
 
They utterly overlook the fact that every time their stupid theory has been put into practice, it has failed miserably.

Okay, they had an excuse in Chile, because there it was imposed at the point of a bayonet. It isn't going that well in Iraq, and they may soon find that the Iraqis would rather do business according to Muslim principles. Again, the Friedmanite crap was imposed at the point of a bayonet and has, so far, failed to remake Iraq as an ecconomic foprce to be reckoned with. (But then, keeping Iraq poor and dependent on our oil companies was probably a more important goal in the first place.

But the Friedmanites have no excuse for what happened in Iceland. Government got out of the way of capital and they all got screwed.

What makes this even more pathetic is that Iceland is exactly the kind of place where, were it any more than a bean counter's erotic dream, laissez-faire cpitalism and minarchy should have worked. The country is so small that one is not likely to meet a stranger on a normal day.

Limited government only works in a state where people can beld accountable by their neighbors.

And it failed like a plutonium sandwich.
 
rustypouch said:
Well, Somalia has next to no government, and look how good things are there!
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Somalia's problem is not so much the fact that it doesn't have a single de facto government... It's that so many violent groups are trying to establish one with all their might.
 
r0ast_p0tat0es said:
Somalia's problem is not so much the fact that it doesn't have a single de facto government... It's that so many violent groups are trying to establish one with all their might.
Click to expand...

What? That´s just entrepreneurialism at its finest! They saw a market niche, and now they try to fill it.
 
Bikewer said:
Most of "government" is pretty well settled by long-established departments and staffed by career bureaucrats.
Click to expand...
That doesn't mean there's no variation in government size, nor that a country can't change from smaller to larger or the other way. And the number of government employees is not the best estimate of government size (though it is OK), since large tax/benefit transfers make a government bigger on a common definition but don't necessarily ramp up its labour force.

What would the "small government" look like?
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Probably not what you have in mind for look like, but . . .

Relatively small / getting smaller governments:

127464b7ea52fe55a0.jpg


Always relatively big governments:

127464b7ea52faaaf5.jpg


Were once smaller / now getting bigger governments:

127464b7ea52fc7c1c.jpg


(The data is from the OECD and includes all state, municipal and local government as well as all social welfare transfers)
 
Hmmm Francesca, that brings up a couple ideas:

How about spending limits based on percentage of GDP?

And another big thought: The more capitalist the country, the lower the percentage of government spending needed to spur the economy? Umm, from comparing the charts for GB and USA, if the gov takes on a bigger load of social services, like health care, shouldn't there be a commensurate increase in the private sector? Looks to me like the biggger the government, the smaller that is left for the private sector... Seems counterproductive from a capitalist viewpoint, where in government's role is to foster the private sector, so we can all benefit...
 
The problem I have with the “small government” proponents is that when you dig into their policies they don’t match the propaganda.

For example:

127464b7ea52fe55a0.jpg


From 1992-2005 Canada was governed by the moderate slightly left of center Liberal party. In 2005 the Conservative party (recently formed when the further right Reform party merged with the more moderate Progressive Conservative part) gained power on a platform of smaller government and fiscal responsibility.

The result? The trend towards smaller government stopped, and the surpluses Canada had worked towards under the Liberals vanished. Yes some of that increase in spending vs GDP is because of the recession, but the budget surpluses had already disappeared and the trend towards smaller government stopped before the recession took hold.

Now look at the US, the 2009 recession notwithstanding it’s the Democratic Presidents, not the Conservative “small government” advocates that actually shrank the size of government. This is a direct reflection of policy, the small government advocates do not want to cut the major spending items like Military, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid etc.

127464b7ea52fc7c1c.jpg


I’m not saying this will be the same everywhere. In fact it seems like the it’s really the centrists who are actually interested in smaller government possibly because they are not married to specific programs the way the more polarized parties are.
 
Francesca R said:
Iceland has long had government larger than the OECD average. Big government can still be extremely rubbish.
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I think Iceland´s main problem was that they didn´t have enough "substance".

In other words, when the whole finance thing tanked, they didn´t have enough of a "real" economy to soak up the losses.

To put things in a perspective: Iceland has ca 320,000 inhabitants - i.e. about 1/1000 as many as the US. From what I heard, 2/3 of their economy and 90% of their exports is fish. Yet they tried to play in the same league as the big boys.
 
Chaos said:
To put things in a perspective: Iceland has ca 320,000 inhabitants - i.e. about 1/1000 as many as the US. From what I heard, 2/3 of their economy and 90% of their exports is fish. Yet they tried to play in the same league as the big boys.
Click to expand...

The problem is that the Friedmanites favored the financial sector of the ecconomy over the industrial sector, just as the Republicans have here over the last 30 years.

Now we have a bloated, parasitic financial sector soaking up at least 40% of our income and damned near no manufacturing going on.

And the fat cats get off paying about 50% less of the burden, in proportion to their income, as the people who actually make the ecconomy work.
 
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