What Exactly is Big Government?

Much of the debate about government today is about how it is too big and how big government is bad. Yet, what exactly is big government? Is it the number of government employees? Is it the amount of money spent? Is it the number of agencies? Is it the number of laws on the books? 

I also often hear the claim, "government was much smaller than it used to be..." and my first reaction is that the population was smaller as well. In 1790 there were 3.9 million people in the US. By 1900 there were 76 million and now there are more than 300 million. 

Therefore it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the size of government in 1790 was much smaller than it is today. With a smaller population there is less interaction and promoting the general welfare doesn't take much effort. Like comparing a small town with a large city, it doesn't make sense because of course the large city is going to have a much larger government than the small town.

The only reason that we argue over big government versus small government is because those that are arguing small government really have no argument at all. The size of government is directly proportional to the task at hand. At least it should be. Often times the government is too small to accomplish a desired goal and other times it's much too large and is over resourced to the task at hand. 

We shouldn't be arguing size of government except in terms of the needed resources to accomplish a given task or goal.  Take your state's DMV offices. The complaints are endless about how long we must wait to renew our drivers license or vehicle registration. Yet you never hear someone say, "I don't want to have to wait so long so I'm going to advocate higher registration fees so that we can have a bigger government to handle the demand thus reducing wait times at the DMV." 

Why is that? Why don't people make that connection? I mean it's one thing to say, "man I spent so much time today at the DMV but that's all right, I'd rather wait than pay a higher fee" and quite another to simply complain about how long it takes at the DMV and how big government can't do anything right.

The problem isn't simply big bad government, it's because the government isn't big enough. For example, it isn't enough to just reduce the paperwork overhead of each interaction but at some point you are going to hit a minimum interaction time just for the time it takes to say, "hello" and "show me your paperwork." 

That's not to say that I'm not interested in reducing red tape where it's possible but the fact of the matter is, there is a certain amount of time it takes that can't ever be reduced or eliminated. There are almost always opportunities to make something more effective and effective government is what we should be debating, not big government versus small government. 

Unless one is going to argue that no government is good, in which case they should be ejected from the discussion, the question we should be asking is, is government effective? We have plenty of data to determine where government is effective or not and we shouldn't be afraid to use it.

Sid Eschenbach has an excellent blog covering several of these points but his overall message is that the economic theory pushed by Republicans over the last 30 years has been throughly debunked by the data. We can see that the tax policy they have been pushing has not been effective. At least in so far as tax policy should benefit everyone and not just a few. 

When we look at the crash of 2008, was government effective in preventing it? Did the SEC do its job? Clearly they did not and clearly the Congress and the White House did not. One would be hard pressed to call their actions or lack thereof, effective. 

Let's start talking about how effective government is being. Are they getting too many or too few resources to accomplish an agreed upon goal? That way we can start looking at what we want to do and what it will cost us. Imagine if George Bush had said, "I think we need to invade Iraq and this is what it is going to cost us and we will have to raise taxes to cover it", what would the debate have been like then? Would we have been so quick to press our military into action?  

What about the health care debate? All we heard was, "big government takeover" and  "they will just screw it up." Never mind that if big government can do a better job than what we have now then why not have a big government takeover of health care? How do you know they will screw it up? There is plenty of evidence that government can in fact be beneficial and not screw it up. 

The next time someone starts complaining about big government, ask them exactly what they mean by big government and how do you define when government transitions from small government to big government? When you have to answer those questions it forces you to think about the effectiveness of government for how do you know how many people to employ if you don't know how effective the existing people are? How do you know how much is appropriate to spend if you don't know how effective your current spending is?

Too many people want to spend time at the bumper sticker level of debate and you will never get any answers from them for questions about what exactly they mean by big government. Ultimately they have nothing to offer in an adult discussion however, you may find a few that start to realize that it's not about big or small government but simply effective government and the more people that understand that, the greater the likelihood we actually get effective government.