"Less government" is a bit of "optimizing for what you can measure": It's easy to see that fewer people work for the government, so the people left must not be

"Less government" is a bit of "optimizing for what you can measure": It's easy to see that fewer people work for the government, so the people left must not be as involved in invading privacy, right? Except that doesn't follow. It's entirely possible to trim NASA, for example, and have less government, but NASA wasn't involved in phone-tapping. Trimming the EPA also won't solve any of the actual problems, and will create new ones. So "less government" is a palatable dogma, maybe, but it's only loosely related to what we're trying to achieve.