I have always considered myself a small-government guy.
Love going to Hong Kong where they run the whole place out of one modest building.
But let’s re-frame the question:
What endeavors do we want to tackle collectively, and what do we want to work out as individuals?
Building highways, defeating the Nazis, running an aircraft carrier, having a fire department, going to the moon, etc. are all things that we can do best collectively. The more people in the pool, the more we can do.
Education is an expensive item with much complexity. In small towns (and there are a lot of them) that are too small for competition, a collective community school seems like a good idea. In large cities, my sense is that vouchers and competition would work better. But vouchers assume that the government should have the money to hand out. What if it were totally privatized? How would we ensure that underclass children get the skills to enter mainstream society?
And public education does indeed create an English-language socialization for our bazillions of immigrants. Most Mexican kids here in Cali prefer speaking English. Only the schools have done that.
If it were totally up to the libertarians, why not extremist Muslim grade schools backed by oil money in every big city? Just one of the “options.” So unraveling the public schools’ semi-monopoly can have a dark side.
And as far as big government goes, Ronny and W did more to create that than any other president in my lifetime–it’s just that much of it was military. As I’ve said before, military spending counts as government spending and it’s one of the most expensive forms of big government. Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex (right about the day I was born, by the way).
I’d like to do a major post on “rethinking education.” Another one on “rethinking military.” I think that these two big ticket items encourage outrageous spending based on obsolete world views. The educational and military situations have changed and we still build schools and weaponry based on former challenges that no longer exist.
It’s not only expensive–it doesn’t get the job done.
Too many American kids go to college and not enough of them get real job skills. Universities are not for everyone.
And why do we really need aircraft carriers and tanks? We need better ways of removing pockets of terrorist extremism and neutralizing crazy world leaders (North Korea). A pitched tank battle is way unlikely. As is a carrier war like the one we had with Japan. We also need to figure out how we are going to engage the Muslim world–much of what we now do just makes it worse. They don’t think as we do but we operate as though they do (rewards and punishment scenarios).
And then there are entitlements. It’s choking California. Many public servants here retire on more money than most in the private sector ever will make.
So how much government should we have?
Education, military, entitlements?
What are your thoughts?
2 comments
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February 6, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Randy Wawrzyniak-Fry
Posts like this lead me to think that you have WAY too much free time on your hands. There was a line in The Big Bang Theory where one of the characters was asked how his day was and he responded “well I’m a physicist so I thought about stuff. [pause] I wrote some of it down.” I sometimes wonder if you could substitute [whatever it is that you do] for physicist.
This type of post leaves me more longing for a foot of fresh powder at Big Bear and a chair lift to your front door. I don’t have any on topic comments at this time, but this post will serve as a place holder to ensure I receive follow-up emails on the topic. Since I’m rather opinionated (I know that comes as a shock) on some of these matters I imagine I’ll weigh in from time to time.
February 7, 2010 at 12:38 am
David in NOLA
I think you are asking the wrong questions. I’ve said this before: the debate over big vs. small government is a false one. On some level, everyone feels that any government that gets in their way is too big, but one that saves their rear when the chips are down (from national defense to the fire department) is just dandy. But that insight is about as far as you can go with this debate in general.
We can, of course, debate whether or not we should have public education, or hire mercenaries to police our streets, or make all roads private toll roads. But you should recognize that these debates have a long history, one that involves policy makers, scholars, participants, etc. and one that has been shaped by all kinds of contextual forces that have nothing to do with philosophies of government. Unless you study that history, you run the risk of simply reinventing the wheel (at best) or looking very ignorant. And having these kinds of discussions in the abstract may be a nice philosophical exercise, but it fails to address the concrete realities of each case. For instance, the history of public education in the U.S. is rather different than public education in France or the UK and the policies we have reflect that history — not some abstract idea about how much government we desire. The same is true of health care, the military, retirement, mortgage interest deductions, etc.
It is very nice to have opinions, but unless those opinions have some kind of grounding in material reality, I doubt they are worth much. Otherwise, it is just a matter of abstract beliefs. And, frankly, I have a great deal more trust in what people really do than in what they say they believe (although the contrast itself can be quite instructive). If we want to understand why things are the way they are, we need to look at what is real. I suggest you ask a different question.