Big Government

The term 'Big Government' frequently comes out of both politicians and citizen's mouths. It is usually in the pejorative, the sense that many problems will go away if only the size of the government were reduced.

The difficulty when an individual speaks out against 'Big Government' is the ambiguity: Surely they don't mean that we should reduce all government, and if they have a specific aspect in mind, why don't they address that directly? It seems to me there is a sort of dishonesty at play here. My observations are that people jump on the anti Big Government bandwagon, thinking that addresses their issue with government, when those driving the wagon have a different aspect in mind.

So, to disambiguate, it seems to me there are several aspects that must be defined and addressed. Can we identify the various aspects of government that people find too big, and develop a reasonable framework for evaluating their concerns? Also, can we quantify 'too big' in any meaningful way?

For starters, let's divide 'Too Big' into two categories: Financial and Intrusive. In speaking with people, their concerns will be sometimes that government is just too big financially: That we as a nation are sending too much of our production to the government to spend. Other people will be concerned less with the financial size, and are more concerned with how intrusive government is in our daily lives, preferring that government would take a more 'hands off' approach.

There are two main ways in which the government intrudes in our lives, one via the laws that constrain our personal behavior, the other the set of laws that constrain and regulate our economic behavior. The second fall mostly on business in the form of regulations governing fair representation of their products, hiring and firing, safety, perhaps product testing. The first, personal, set regulates how we can relate to one another, the actions we can and cannot take with respect to other individuals.

Financially, the government provides four broad areas of services. There is defense, the spending on our military and the subsequent flows of money to our defense contractors that build planes and ships and vehicles and munitions. There is the flow of money for infrastructure improvements across the nation: schools, roads and bridges, environment cleanup and preservation, water works, energy. Third we can identify the 'Social Safety Net', spending on care for the elderly, payments to widows and orphans, unemployment, programs designed with the goal of preventing or at least reducing poverty. Lastly, we identify as an area of spending government funded research. This will include non-military research, as that is usually lumped into the numbers presented on defense spending.

That's a start: We have identified six aspects of government, any of which an individual may think has grown too big: Personal Intrusion, Economic Intrusion, Defense Spending, Infrastructure Spending, Social Spending, and Research Spending.

So, the next time you hear someone advocating for the reduction in 'Big Government', pin them down to one of these six (or, if they have something else in mind, get that.) It seems to me that will provide a much more useful position in which to segue into a debate about the merits and costs of what they may be advocating. It should prove useful in clarifying their position, and it may even prove humorous: What if they don't know?