Friday, May 14, 2010

Small Government Paradoxes, a Lampost, a Soccer Zinger.

These dudes over HERE wonder if problems could be solved by small government.

The answer is sure, probably. In some cases.

But that would mean that incredibly competent, overachieving smart people would need to be running things. Which creates a paradox of sorts, since the people that clamor for "small government" are in fact the exact same people who instead of being grownups demand that elections be based on who waves the flag the hardest, or who claims to love God more, who spends the most time driving their kids to soccer practice every day, to say nothing of the by-now standard trope of "someone I'd have a beer with" vs. "elitist book-reader." Tho to be honest I'm not sure I used the word paradox correctly, but you get my drift. I probably shoulda used "conundrum." Hey, fuck me.

Also, at which point is government "small" enough? You, me, and the lamppost have no actual idea of what some sort of "magic number" size the government should be. I would think "small government" actually means "an endless search for smallER government," and could therein hope to be folded down over and over again until it's just a small group of decision-makers that, while small in number, ironically hold as much Orwellian power over everybody as "big government" does. Interesting.

1 comment:

Kiko Jones said...

You overthink it, my friend.

Smaller government means corporations and rich people have as much leeway to do whatever they want to fuck people over and pay as little taxes as possible. Then they sell it to the dumb folk as their chance at truly being rich one day and not letting the government turn your kids gay.