The Myth of Small Government

[kpominville]

The Myth of Small Government

Whenever I ask a conservative what exactly they believe, they predictably bring up a sound byte most of them don’t give a second thought: “small government”.

The problem with this sound byte is that it isn’t really a conservative belief. It is only something they give lip service to and it is designed specifically to avoid talking about what they really believe. The very idea that the government of a nation the size of America should be forced into constraints of an arbitrary size makes no sense to a rational mind. We need a government of a sufficient size to handle the needs of the citizens. It makes no sense to say "our government can never get larger than X". That is an arbitrary choice that has no basis in our actual needs whatsoever. It only serves as a simplistic talking point for conservatives to focus on instead of talking about complex issues like the proper role of government that may force them to rethink some of their extremist ideas.

What conservatives really believe, simply put, is that that the sole role of government is to “protect property”, which means their idea of government is nothing more than police and a military. Their vision of government is little more than a king and his army. If they can’t see a King doing it, they consider it an “entitlement” and don’t want the American government doing it. They can’t imagine a King providing unemployment insurance, social security or health insurance so they oppose all the American government doing any of those things. The problem with that is the preamble of the Constitution specifically states the purpose of our government is to do a lot more than merely protecting property, like providing for the general welfare, but conservatives who claim to support the Constitution conveniently ignore that fact.

The reality is, during the last decade, conservative Republicans oversaw the largest expansion of the federal government since the new deal. They created a brand new massive government bureaucracy, the department of homeland security. They also started not one, but two, unfunded and unending wars that have cost us over a trillion dollars. Then they also passed another massive corporate welfare package, Medicare Part D, also unpaid for. So despite their rhetoric, what America actually gets when we elect conservatives is a LOT more government and a LOT more government debt, but since their expansions are in the narrow realm of what they think government should do, police and military, they have no problems with massively expanding the size and cost of government. Predictably, as soon as the newly elected administration started talking about reforming health insurance, something conservatives don’t think government should do, they pretended to be outraged at the national debt and refuse to admit their own role in growing it to its current size.

Consider that military spending in all its forms now constitutes 53.3% of total US federal spending.

That means more than half the total spending by the federal government is going towards the military in one way or another, either to the pentagon, weapons manufacturers, military contractors (who earn over $100k a year per person and we have as many of them in the middle east as we do U.S. Soldiers), veterans in the form of disability benefits or for VA health coverage.

Consider that we have over 140 military bases on foreign soil, many of which serve no purpose except to cost us trillions and anger the locals as was the case with the Saudis who attacked us on 09-11-2001. We have an easy and obvious path to save trillions of dollars but conservatives oppose any cuts to military spending. Conservatives talk a lot about smaller government but they know to actually do it would negatively affect millions of average Americans, making it political suicide, therefore after a decade of being in control of all three branches of government they utterly failed to deliver on it.

Traditionally, liberals believe we should either have no standing army during times of peace or it should at least be minimal during times of peace. The original intent of the 2nd Amendment was to prohibit a standing army by making every citizen a member of a Switzerland-style militia. That has been warped by conservatives into a gun toting America where 2 year old routinely get shot by criminals with easy access to guns.


The reality is that everyone wants a less expensive government, but the debate needs to be about the proper role of government and the proper size of our military. Instead, what we are getting from conservative opposition right now is more Tim McVeigh-style anti-government rhetoric and talk of revolution and secession.