We are told that there was a time when monsters roamed the Earth. Giant reptiles with greek and latin names that towered above all other creatures… and then they were gone. Giants often fare poorly in our world. Jack and the Beanstalk’s nemesis fee-fi-fo-fummed all the way to the ground, Goliath was felled with a stone slung by a young farm boy, and Andre the Giant succumbed to a sad and painful death at too young an age.
Likewise, in the world of technology, bigger is not always better. Lighter, smaller, more versatile is the order of the day. Gone are the days of cars the size of small houses. My old Catalina had a hood that was longer than the Kia Soul I rented last week! Computers that used to require entire rooms to accommodate, are surpassed by the iPad in my desk drawer. Back in the day a friend had one of the first cell phones… it was the size of a backpack, and didn’t even have a camera!
Except where size itself is a basic requirement for the task at hand; i.e. jumbo jets, earth moving machinery, and defensive linemen; largeness is generally detrimental to overall functionality. Schools and Universities have learned the value of smaller class sizes, megachurches quickly discovered the need to break up their congregations into small groups, and the sixties proved that the large commune was inferior to the family as a basic social unit. Big things are generally clumsy, awkward, and inefficient. Huge corporations, government bureaucracies, massive religious organizations, in the end all use vast quantities of resources to maintain their own existence. Harmony among giants is rare, as their very size demands that they control their world rather than respond to it.
The words “small government” generally fill progressives with visions of libertarian boogeymen, anarchists with a deep-seated hatred for all forms of government, regressive reactionaries who want to return to the Wild West, or at least to the revolutionary ideas of the founding fathers (gasp!). “Who will build the roads?” “What about the children?” (It’s always the roads and the children.) Honestly, our government will never again resemble what it did in the days of Washington and Adams; it was never intended to. As the nation has grown, the appearance and form of our governing bodies have changed, not always for the better, but that is how you grow. What cannot be lost, and what we have sometimes let slide, are the ideas and values built into our origins that made us what we are. These are the bedrock and foundations that preserve our greatness and liberty. Small government doesn’t mean no government. It doesn’t even mean weak government. “Smallness” is a measure of size and structure, not power or effectiveness. I’ll put my iPhone up against my friend’s vintage backpack phone any day… yet it fits in my pocket. A Kawasaki Ninja would fit in the back of my old ’72 Chrysler wagon, but would have quite an edge in a race despite its relative smallness. Likewise streamlined governance performed at levels appropriate to the needs of the people can be more powerful, more responsive, and of greater benefit; while being less costly, less wasteful, and less intrusive. City and county governments do not exceed the size of the state governments they exist under, and state governments are dwarfed by the size of the Federal one, but that doesn’t mean that these “smaller” governments are less powerful. What it does mean is that the laws they impose address the needs of a smaller and generally more homogenous populace, while having no effect on people outside their jurisdiction. When “Big” government oversteps its bounds it attempts to legislate common standards for disparate groups. Pretty soon you’ll have Bill DeBlasio setting farm policy for upstate horse farms, Andy Cuomo telling the guys from Duck Dynasty that they can only have seven bullets, and Democrats telling young people that they have to buy insurance to subsidize their elders… oh, wait, that one already happened.
IMHO: If Conservatives are in fact guilty of nostalgia for the times of Jefferson and Franklin, Progressives are blind to the fact that we no longer live in the days of their patron saints, Woodrow Wilson and the Roosevelts. The diversity of our nation’s people has only increased with the times we live in. A huge and clunky Federal government can no longer represent every segment of its population except for a few fundamental purposes like national defense, border control, national treaties, and disputes between states. Government needs to be closer to the people it serves, away from the disfunction of Washington, more in tune with the varied people it represents, less indebted to the special interests of states hundreds of miles away. It needs to be quicker, more responsive, more specialized, nimbler… smaller. If New York City wants to experiment with the liberal policies of their new mayor, that is their call… the state shouldn’t interfere. If a state wants legalized marijuana, or a city wants to eliminate happy meals… it’s a free country. Likewise, if almost every county in upstate New York finds the Safe Act intrusive and unwarranted, how are they being represented by their government which acquiesces only to the urban sensibilities of the downstate politicians and the presidential ambitions of its governor? Oh, the argument can always be made that what our neighbors do somehow affects us, but where do you draw the line? A free society entails suffering with the freedoms of others. I don’t need freedom to do what you agree with. We need freedom to do things differently than what other citizens might think is best. We need the freedom to fail. We need small governments that respond and legislate at state and local levels for a nation united but diverse. The debacle of Obamacare should not be seen just as the Democratic failure that it is, but it should be a case study of how the big government solutions of both parties no longer meet our needs. For so many issues, we need the decisions to be more local, made by people who are more in touch with their constituents, and less in touch with Washington lobbyists and the high stakes games they play. Progressives once took on the massive monopolies that had rigged the game with their graft and influence. How odd that they do not recognize this one grand trust that needs busting! We can fix government, we can make it better, but it means letting the archaic ideas of central planning go the way of the wagon wheel, back-pack phones, and computers the size of refrigerators. Otherwise we will live in a world still ruled by dinosaurs, where they are the Gods, and you are food. The future is small.
I can see where you are going with this but using technological advancements as an argument in favor of your interpretation of small government doesn’t work. While computers, phones, etc. have become smaller in size, their inner complexity has increased dramatically, mostly thanks to advancements in semiconductor technology. Such items are now much smaller than they used to be but they are also much more complex. Yet complexity is exactly where “big” government fails. Programs that are too complicated suffer from excessive bureaucracy, unforeseeable loopholes etc. Obamacare will ultimately prove successful as an important step toward universal health care in the United States but it is flawed on many levels and one major flaw is that it is simply too complicated. Instead of implementing a single-payer system, which would have been fair and manageable but had no chance of passage, the government was forced to produce a bill that will prove to be a boon for many Americans but at the same time constitutes a bureaucratic mess. Your idea of small government is decentralized government, a notion which I wholeheartedly agree with. Indeed, many aspects of our lives are best governed on a local level. However, sometimes it is not only necessary but a moral imperative to deal with important matters (the roads, the children) on a national level. I believe that access to affordable health care regardless of one’s financial means and physical location is one of them.