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By Mike Gray
“Big” isn’t usually a pejorative. There is nothing wrong with big airplanes, which can carry more people more safely and economically than can small airplanes. There is nothing wrong with a big serve in tennis, although I don’t like to see one coming at me. But there is no “right” size for airplanes or “right” speed for tennis serves, so we have no grounds for calling them “too big.” There is, however, a “right” size for government. The right size relates not to its budget or number of employees, but rather to its functions.
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There are a number of good reasons why big government is undesirable:
. . . . Big government is the enemy of liberty. Government actions that go beyond its defensive, rights-preserving functions necessarily entail some form of coercion that diminishes the freedom of at least some people to do what they would like to do. The bigger the government gets, the more it reduces liberty.
. . . . Big government is also the enemy of prosperity. This is so because big government invariably wastes resources.
. . . . Big government … often fails to protect liberty and property. Frequently special-interest groups that feel threatened by some innovation will lobby the government to do what they cannot legally do on their own, namely, interfere with the freedom of the innovators. As a political favor to those groups, big government often locks in the status quo with laws and regulations. Progress is thereby stifled.
. . . . When government is right-sized, it outlaws and punishes aggressive acts against people and their belongings. That raises the cost of aggression, thereby helping to deter it and channel people’s desire to get more for themselves into peaceful means. Cooperation and trade flourish in this environment. People come to realize, at least implicitly, that there is a natural harmony among their interests …. Antagonisms and hatreds may not disappear, but they are minimized.
Big government, however, holds and inevitably uses the power to make some people better off at the expense of others. This creates hostility, bitterness, and sometimes violence where there would otherwise be none.
. . . . Right-sized governments do not try to make their people moral. Instead, they preserve the freedom of individuals to act as they think best to promote morality. Churches, civic groups, writers, and orators are free to try to persuade people to live what they regard as a moral life. Government should protect the right of all to enter the marketplace of ideas about morality but should draw the line at actions that force others to live by those ideas. Arguing that alcoholic beverages are evil and should not be consumed is fine; smashing bars and burning down distilleries is not.
One of the most important foundations of morality, and one that is reinforced by right-sized government, is the live-and-let-live philosophy. So long as a person violates no one’s rights—deprives no one of anything to which he is entitled—this philosophy says we may not coerce him. Live-and-let-live adherents may not approve of things that others do, but they do not believe they have any right to use force to make them behave differently. Might never makes right, and the willingness to renounce it is a hallmark of morality.
But big government undermines morality. It does so by seducing people into the belief that might does make right—provided that it is exercised democratically.
. . . . Prior to the advent of big government, when people wanted to accomplish something, whether personal enrichment or the realization of some lofty social dream, they knew they had to go about it through peaceful means. Big government encourages them to use politics to accomplish their objectives, thus legitimizing coercion. And with the legitimization of this variety of coercion, is it any wonder that many people conclude that coercion is permissible even without playing the political game first?
— George C. Leef, “What’s So Bad about Big Government Anyway?”
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