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Small government smoke screen

Republican concept of  “small government” is a fake and 100% pure hypocrisy as they don't count the military and police as part of “the government”. It’s hard to believe that conservatism in this country was once identified with an opposition to foreign entanglements and large military establishments. The Reagan's agenda of fake “deregulation” and “privatization” was in essence  the same kind of kleptocratic insider dealing that characterized Yeltsin’s Russia.

After the past eight years in American politics, it is impossible to reconcile current promises by conservatives for small government with the historical record of President Bush's administration. Most experts on the left and right can find one issue upon which to agree: The federal government expanded significantly after 2001 when George W. Bush was in the White House.

The growth did not just take place with national security spending but with domestic programs as well. Even as the administration fought to reduce the cost of certain programs by preventing cost-of-living increases in benefits, in many other areas of policy -- such as Medicare prescription drug benefits, federal education standards and agricultural subsidies -- the federal government expanded by leaps and bounds. And then there are the costs of Afghanistan and Iraq.

 The conservative Cato Institute reported in 2005 that total government spending increased by a third during Bush's first term -- "the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson."

Zelizer's article also notes the expansion of executive power under Republican rule, hardly commensurate with their advocacy of smaller government.

Fifty years of American history have shown that even the party that traditionally advocates small government on the campaign trail opts for big government when it gets into power. The rhetoric of small government has helped Republicans attract some support in the past, but it is hard to take such rhetoric seriously given the historical record -- and it is a now a question whether this rhetoric is even appealing since many Americans want government to help them cope with the current crisis.

Government-bashing is an ever-present staple of GOP propaganda.

Friedman's argument against social democracy was that it would not do the job -- that you would lose a lot of economic efficiency and some political liberty and in return get no equalization of economic power because the government would redistribute income and wealth the wrong way, and the beneficiaries would be the strong political claimants to governmental largess who would not be those with strong claims to more opportunity.

By the time you have resorted to arguing that "human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to 'Aristotelian happiness'... because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived..." you have lost the argument completely. And I have not even raised the point that Aristotle thought that Aristotelian happiness was possible only if you yourself owned lots of slaves:

Aristotle: There is in some cases a marked distinction between the two classes, rendering it expedient and right for the one to be slaves and the others to be masters.... The master is not called a master because he has science, but because he is of a certain character.... [T]here may be a science for the master and science for the slave. The science of the slave would be such as the man of Syracuse taught who made money by instructing slaves in their ordinary duties.... But all such branches of knowledge are servile. There is likewise a science of the master... not anything great or wonderful; for the master need only know how to order that which the slave must know how to execute. Hence those who are in a position which places them above toil have stewars who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philosophy or with politics...

The "grounded in greed" counterargument you see in the comment above is every bit as aprioristic. When you get to that point we're just yelling slogans at each other.

Old News

Republicans The Fake Party of Small Government « Little Alex in Wonderland

17 July 09 | C4SS

People who vote Republican in the belief that the GOP is the party of small government need to get out of their codependent relationship.

Republicans claim to be the party of the head rather than the heart, the party that never lets wishful thinking trump the law of unintended consequences — unless, of course, proper reverence for the Flag or Fatherland is involved. And recognizing that actions have consequences, in the realm of foreign policy, is just a fancy way of saying “defeatism.”

Come to think of it, there really seems to be a lot of messy Freudian stuff lurking beneath that Republican facade of stern common sense, doesn’t there? Just consider how prominently accusations of being “soft” on this or that, or “getting tough” on something or other, or “showing them” or “teaching them a lesson”, figure in their rhetoric. The Republicans: party of penis envy?

Republican claims to be the party of small government are equally nonsensical.

First of all, it’s a rather odd conception of “small government” that doesn’t count the military and police as part of “the government”. It’s hard to believe that conservatism in this country was once identified with an opposition to foreign entanglements and large military establishments, or that the perpetual warfare state was originally created by liberals. In fact, the legal precedents and constitutional arguments that the neocons appeal to in order to justify their wet dream National Security State all come from paragons of conservatism like Lincoln, Wilson and FDR.

Today, we’re constantly reminded by self-described “conservatives” that loyal Americans rally around their “Commander-in-Chief” in wartime, and “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Sean Hannity got his knickers in a twist because some Democratic senator accused “our Commander-in-Chief” of lying–in (gasp) WARTIME! Not only does “politics stop at the water’s edge” for Republicans, but apparently Acton’s Law stops there as well. Seems to me that if patriotic Americans are required to suspend their normal distrust of government in wartime “for the duration,” that’s a mighty powerful incentive for the “Commander-in-Chief” to STAY at war as much as possible. As Dubya said some time or other, ‘it’s a lot easier when you’re a dictator’.

(Ever notice, by the way, that the same people so outraged that Pelosi would accuse the “heroes” in the C.I.A. of lying were themselves making the same accusation back when it involved Valerie Plame and Doug Feith?)

It’s also an odd conception of “small government” that tasks it with making sure no two people with the same kinds of pee-pee get married, that nobody sees Janet Jackson’s tit or hears one of George Carlin’s “seven words”, and that everybody “Just Says No” to drugs (other than Ritalin and Gardasil).

But even stipulating that “small government” principles only refer to domestic economic and regulatory policies that don’t involve drugs or genitalia, the Republicans’ “free market” rhetoric is a bunch of buncombe. The Reaganite agenda of fake “deregulation” and “privatization” usually involves, in actual practice, the same kind of kleptocratic insider dealing that characterized Yeltsin’s Russia. The GOP’s “small government” economic policy, when you get right down to it, is even more corporatist than that of the Democrats–and you’ve got to go a ways to beat them.

What about the Republicans as the party of “strict constitutionalism” and “original understanding”? What that translates into in plain English, Jeffrey Toobin says, is “a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society”. Chief Justice Roberts, in every major case, “has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff”. And come to think of it, I don’t recall Madison and Jefferson advocating a set of Executive “national security” prerogatives as unbounded as those of Charles I.

(Did you notice, by the way, that these enemies of “judicial activism” were pressuring Sotomayor to discover a new fundamental right–the right to keep and bear arms–among those incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment?)

You folks out there with “Democrats Care” bumper stickers shouldn’t be enjoying this overmuch. Behind all the crap about “America’s working families”, the Democrats are really just the other corporatist party. Democrats need to get over their own codependent relationship. But that’s another column.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, both of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

The Appeal to "Undecidability" as Last Gasp

Ross Douthat:

The Case For Small Government: I think the argument suffers from a problem that's common to both sides in the debates over the desirability of European-style social democracy - namely, the hope that what's ultimately a philosophical and moral controversy can have a tidy empirical resolution.... [T]he philosophical case for limited government - that human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to "Aristotelian happiness"... because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived - he's on firm (if obviously arguable) ground. But when he segues into the possibility that the emerging science of human nature will "prove" the limits of welfare-statism, and force liberals to give ground... there's an unwarranted hope that the right facts and figures can settle a debate that ultimately depends on the philosophical assumptions that you bring to it...

Matthew Yglesias calls bullshit:

Matthew Yglesias: Crippling Poverty is Not Service to Family: Left out of here is what the right always loves to leave out of discussions of economic policy choices: interest. If you’re poor in the United States and you live in a neighborhood where poor people can afford to live, you will almost certainly be living in a neighborhood that’s much more dangerous than the neighborhoods in which poor Dutch people live. You’ll also find yourself living in a country that’s much less friendly to the interests of people who can’t afford a car than is the Netherlands.

Conversely, if a European executive meets an American executive and feels a twinge of jealousy, it’s not for the American’s greater level of “entrepreneurship” it’s for the fact that the U.S. social model leaves top executives much richer than European executives....

[I]ncome level is fairly predictive of voting behavior and this is neither a coincidence nor the reflection of an abstract disagreement about the value of “voluntarism.” It reflects the fact that politics is, among other things, a concrete contest over concrete economic interests.... I don’t think, for example, that America’s high child poverty rate reflects American preference for “service to one’s family” over “ease of life”...

As Milton Friedman put it back in 1953:

The basic objectives, shared, I am sure, by most economics, are political freedom, economic efficiency, and substantial equality of economic power. These objectives are not, of course, entirely consistent.... I believe -- and at this stage agreement will be far less widespread -- that all three objectives can best be realized by relying, as far as possible, on a market mechanism within a "competitive order" to organize the utilization of economic resources...