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This is just one of the reasons I got out of politics several years ago. Simply put, things don't work the way most people think they do. Policies are decided

This is just one of the reasons I got out of politics several years ago. Simply put, things don't work the way most people think they do. Policies are decided behind closed doors, by people with vested interests, and then presented to the public - who are by and large uninterested, uninformed, insufficiently educated and unwilling to consider anything but their immediate short-term interests. As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "If voting changed anything,they'd make it illegal."

gwright 15y ago
Thus the interest that many of us have in reducing the size of government and in general the concept of limited government. Unfortunately the general direction seems to be in increasing the size of government and the rationale seems to be 'so it can fix everything'.
- winestock 15y ago
  Bless your heart, I truly and sincerely sympathize with the concept of limited government, no joke. However, limited government is to political science what perpetual motion machines are to physics. Whatever body limits the government is itself sovereign. What limits that body? Are written constitutions supposed to limit the power of government? Who implements those provisions if not the government? The concept of limited government, as it is typically expressed today, had its origins in the Enlightenment. It was all the rage among the cool people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That idea deeply influenced the constitutions of nearly every nation in the West. Look around. All of those nations now have large and growing governments. The idea of limiting the scope and reach of government by popular will or by written charter has had a track record of perfect failure. A government of limited and specifically enumerated powers is too weak to resist pressure to make it larger. The best way to get big government is to start with a small government. The way out of this is to think sideways.
  - Gormo 15y ago
    > Whatever body limits the government is itself sovereign. Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance. The catch is that this isn't really possible if the entire system of government is organized on democratic principles - we currently have too much democratic process to achieve appropriately democratic outcomes. Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it. If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off.
    - winestock 15y ago
      > Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance. The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular. Medicare. Medicaid. An enormous military. The Drug War. Social Security. Proposing serious cuts to most of these programs is electoral suicide. Look at what happened to Barry Goldwater. This holds even more true in Europe. > Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it. Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest. > If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off. The courts themselves have given their stamp of approval to legislative and executive over-reaching. The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter. Franklin Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court was the last stand for judicial limitation of the government. Besides, who decides what judges sit on federal benches if not the legislative and executive branches? Again, conflict of interest.
- guelo 15y ago
  The problem with limited government is the management of the commons. Everybody wants safe water, safe air, safe food, etc. Also you need to make investments in the future such as infrastructure, science research, education, etc. Once you have a huge economy with powerful competing interests you're going to need a big government to manage it all. The "small government" types say that we should let the free market somehow make the choices on all these things, but I think that is just naive thinking.

gwright 15y ago

Thus the interest that many of us have in reducing the size of government and in general the concept of limited government. Unfortunately the general direction seems to be in increasing the size of government and the rationale seems to be 'so it can fix everything'.

winestock 15y ago
Bless your heart, I truly and sincerely sympathize with the concept of limited government, no joke. However, limited government is to political science what perpetual motion machines are to physics. Whatever body limits the government is itself sovereign. What limits that body? Are written constitutions supposed to limit the power of government? Who implements those provisions if not the government? The concept of limited government, as it is typically expressed today, had its origins in the Enlightenment. It was all the rage among the cool people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That idea deeply influenced the constitutions of nearly every nation in the West. Look around. All of those nations now have large and growing governments. The idea of limiting the scope and reach of government by popular will or by written charter has had a track record of perfect failure. A government of limited and specifically enumerated powers is too weak to resist pressure to make it larger. The best way to get big government is to start with a small government. The way out of this is to think sideways.
- Gormo 15y ago
  > Whatever body limits the government is itself sovereign. Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance. The catch is that this isn't really possible if the entire system of government is organized on democratic principles - we currently have too much democratic process to achieve appropriately democratic outcomes. Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it. If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off.
  - winestock 15y ago
    > Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance. The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular. Medicare. Medicaid. An enormous military. The Drug War. Social Security. Proposing serious cuts to most of these programs is electoral suicide. Look at what happened to Barry Goldwater. This holds even more true in Europe. > Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it. Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest. > If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off. The courts themselves have given their stamp of approval to legislative and executive over-reaching. The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter. Franklin Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court was the last stand for judicial limitation of the government. Besides, who decides what judges sit on federal benches if not the legislative and executive branches? Again, conflict of interest.
guelo 15y ago
The problem with limited government is the management of the commons. Everybody wants safe water, safe air, safe food, etc. Also you need to make investments in the future such as infrastructure, science research, education, etc. Once you have a huge economy with powerful competing interests you're going to need a big government to manage it all. The "small government" types say that we should let the free market somehow make the choices on all these things, but I think that is just naive thinking.