> smaller federal government > larger federal government I find both of these positions frustratingly vague, and I'm eager to blame them for making the proble

> smaller federal government > larger federal government I find both of these positions frustratingly vague, and I'm eager to blame them for making the problem appear intractable. They're perfectly intuitive enough to make people have a gut-feeling for what it means without actually thinking about what it means, and in that sense avoid actually debating that, which would be productive. What does "large" and "small" even mean? Governments are complex social/cultural/legal systems, no matter what the "size". I'm pretty sure waterbed theory applies here[0]. (This is not a critique of your post, but about the US discourse surrounding this in general. At least how it comes across to me as a European) [0] "the observation, ascribed to Larry Wall, that some systems, such as human and computer languages, contain a minimum amount of complexity, and that attempting to "push down" the complexity of such a system in one place will invariably cause complexity to "pop up" elsewhere.", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory