The Immeasurable Size of Limited Government

We hear common conservatives sing the benefits of limited government. The refrains usually sound like: “Big government is bad!” or “We need responsible but limited government!” or some such nonsense. This is one of the major fallacies and naiveties touted by common conservatives.

The concept of big government versus small government is fallacious. It has no intelligent meaning outside of rhetoric. Conservatives have to get through their thick skulls a simple fact of reality: it is impossible to measure government. I genuinely fear that conservatives innately deceive themselves into thinking otherwise. Why? I do not know.

Government is not a quantifiable phenomenon. If you can understand that fact, you have hope. Until you accept that fact, you will forever be wondering aimlessly in political cognitive dissonance.

The conservative will typically demand that governments be limited to dealing with defense, law and order. [Sometimes confused conservatives will include core services -- however nebulously defined -- into the mix.] According to the common conservative, any other responsibilities becomes big government. Such designated roles for government may seem intuitive but they are most definitely arbitrary. I wish to return to this point later.

Foolishly some people will look at government spending as a proxy for government size. That may make sense to the arbitrary practice of accounting but nothing more.

I can spend $10 on a packet of cigarettes or on a house plant or on a guard dog or on a pet rock for that matter. You could do the same. The guy sitting on the park bench talking to himself can do the same. Even worse: the government could buy those things on our behalf. The amount of spending means nothing. I could not care less if you buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke it in one day. You might get a lot of relaxation from that. Some other person might enjoy those same cigarettes for a full week. Both of you would probably increase your chances of lung cancer and yet, reduce your stress because of the enjoyment. You win some and you lose some but the same amount of money has different effects on different people.

A $1,000,000 government expenditure thrown into a fire pit may be less harmful than a $100,000 government expenditure in advertizing contracts because the government bids up prices and crowds out private industry.

The point being: the amount of money spent is subjectively valued differently, on an individual basis and disproportionately throughout the whole economy. There is no way of measuring how much value is created by a certain amount of spending across an entire population. So, using government spending as a proxy for government size is without merit.

What is more important is what government does rather than how much government spends. I want to convey this concept with a simple example. Before looking at this example, a practical definition of government must be established and it will be based on observable actions. Government is an organization of people who claim moral authority to coerce citizens into following orders.

Consider a person in prison. (Forget for the moment why that person is in prison.) It matters not how much money is being spent — I would say wasted — on keeping this prisoner incarcerated. In fact, the amount of money could be quite little. Nevertheless, to the prisoner, the government is gargantuan because the coercion endured by the prisoner is physically insurmountable.

Now, extrapolate this logic to all other forms of coercion exacted by government. You are faced with a relationship whereby government places you somewhere along a continuum between complete slavery and absolute freedom. The size of government is always and everywhere subjective.

The problem with touting a small government label is that the socialists can do the same. A hypothetical socialist can demand that the government subsidize and monopolize a universal child-care service while leaving everything else to the private market. In keeping with the common conservative attitude, such a socialist would in fact qualify as an advocate of small government too.

The difference between my hypothetical socialist and the common conservative is one of choice: they prefer different roles for government. A conservative who advocates small government is lying. He is lying either to you or to himself. Such a conservative is actually expressing a preference for select duties of government (which he believes are the right duties) and a dislike for other duties (which he believes are wrong) — a distinction for which he has no objective argument. Very few conservatives look past the erroneous concept of government size to question their preferences for different roles of government.

There is no objective reason why small government should be confined to law, order, policing, security, military, national defense markets while staying out of other sectors of the economy. Such a conservative bias is more properly described as a socialist who demands government subsidy, monopolization and cronyism in the legal or security industries — in other words, a selective aversion to the free market.

from a multi-part series entitled “The Subconscious of a Conservative“