Size matters not
Wisconsin Labor Rally – Madison, WI – Saturday, Feb 26 2011 from ubiquity75 on Vimeo.
One of the more important conversations I had in my college career went something like:
Professor: So really, a paper is just an answer to a question
Me: So how do you generate questions
Professor: that’s the hard part.
The trick to writing a good paper is to think of a question no one has ever before answered, and then answer it. And you need to anticipate every possible objection– questions about your methodology, data, etc– and answer those, too. Want to tear a paper apart? The trick to that is not to attack the methodology, but to attack the thing I just glossed over in the “etc”*. Attacking the basic assumptions made by a thought process is the the most fundamental method of determining the strength of that thought process.
So: how big should government be? This isn’t the fundamental question, obviously. The fundamental question is “what is government”. Wikipedia provides a pretty good answer: “governments are the means through which state power is employed”. Employing state power sounds… unpleasant. So that brings up the next question “why would we want that?”
The very short version is this: government exists in order to facilitate positive-sum interactions, in cases where humans tend to default to negative-sum interactions.
There are a whole host of goods and services for which it is cheaper to buy them in bulk, or there are positive or negative externalities associated with their presence or absence**. It is almost always easier for government to set up rules for private organizations to provide those goods and services, but once we have a fabulous coercive mechanism in place, there is a temptation to use that mechanism to provide for some of those goods and services.
Once citizens decide to use the coercive power of the State to do things like pay for children to learn things, or keep unemployed people from starving to death, or keep old people from dying in the gutters, or create and maintain a system for removing excrement from our homes and transporting it elsewhere, or any of a thousand other things, we need to pay people to do these things, and (with some oversight and performance metrics ) get out of their way.
Vague talk about “shrinking government” doesn’t really enter into this equation. The question is “which services are we collectively over-paying for?” It may even be “which programs should we cease being responsible for collectively?” The question, in other words, isn’t about size, it’s about efficiency.
I don’t like paying taxes either. I don’t like paying for anything, but the people who create the goods and services I want would like some recompense for their labor. It doesn’t really matter if I’m paying a private organization or a public one– I’ve still got to pay for services rendered.
*see what I did there?
**Yeah, I’m repeating stuff I said yesterday
