As long as I’ve been writing commentary on this site, I’ve received comments from proponents of “small government,” who argue, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan and others, that small government is better.
What few of these proponents of “small government” seem to understand is that the combination of small government and high technology is not a recipe for freedom, but for oppression of everyone but the well-off by the well-off. Now… I am not anywhere close to a fan of government for the sake of government or for more bureaucracy and government agencies, but the problem we face as a society is that technology, especially high technology, requires bigness, and bigness equals power, and government, and sometimes not even government, is about all that can rein in concentrated corporate power.
At one point, the United States did have small government. We didn’t have food inspections, and the amount of tainted, spoiled, and bad food sold was enormous. We didn’t have environmental regulations, and most major rivers were dead or dying, and little could live in them, and several were so polluted they caught fire. The air was so filled with soot in some cities that white shirts were gray by noon. We didn’t have banking regulations, and on a regular basis there were widespread bank failures where depositors lost everything. We didn’t even have standardized time zones, and train schedules were essentially unusable.
Today, the United States and the world is far more advanced – and complex. There are over 80,000 flights in the United States every day. Major airports average a takeoff and landing every 1-4 minutes. Despite all the complaints, the U.S. averages about one major commercial accident a year, and some years have passed without any. Without government-imposed uniform standards for operations, safety, and maintenance, those numbers would be far higher. Without regulation of the communications spectrum, broadcasting would be either chaos or the property of broadcasters with the biggest wallets and the most powerful transmitters.
Despite the complaints and the touting of industry about its innovation, without government funding and research, we wouldn’t have the internet or the I-Phone. Nor would we have the interstate highway system. We would also have millions of people living and dying in extreme poverty – as they once did – as opposed to a less than perfectly efficient welfare/disability system that results in a much less than desirable and barely adequate standard of living for a majority of the unemployed or unemployable.
Yet despite the progress created by government, imperfect as it is, there is a lack of recognition of how it has improved life in the United States for virtually everyone, and the cries for small government continue. What these people want, it seems to me, is less government regulation over that sector of commerce, business, or life that is most important to them, in particular, and fewer rules and regulations that impede their freedom of action and ability to maximize profits.
Government is anything but perfect, and in many areas, its regulations are indeed cumbersome and sometime unnecessary. In other areas, the regulations don’t work, and in some areas, more regulation is likely necessary. But what that means is that we need more effective and efficient government, not the “small government” so often touted by both ultra-conservatives and ultra-libertarians. We tried small government, and it didn’t work for a moderately complex industrializing society, and it certainly won’t work for a society that’s even more complex in a world that is getting ever more complicated.
But then, the history of small government, and its copious failures, has already been forgotten, as so much of unpleasant history is, lost in the nostalgia for a time that never was.