What if we did have smaller government as some Republicans want, what then?

I think a smaller government would be one with less diverse of an opinion on things…which could be a good thing as well as bad of course.

A lot of legislators will experience the joys of unemployment

The services that are currently provided by the taxpayers would, instead be provided on a pay per use basis to those who could afford it, and the rest would go without.

I have read that many Republicans want to sell our National parks to private owners, and turn them into attractions like Disneyland, for only the people who can afford the admission.

Take all the trees and put them on a tree museum
Charge all the people a dollar and a half to see them

There’s the song for the commercial

The Republicans don’t want a smaller government. They say they do, but they don’t. Bush blew up the government like a balloon. Reagan did too. Just like they claim they want a balanced budget. But they don’t.

The Republicans believe that there is no such thing as “the common good.” Rather, they believe that people are fundamentally selfish and only out for themselves; so when they band together to pursue their interests, they create a vicious zero-sum game in which the devil takes the hindmost. Consequently, they see government as a scam in which one group gains control of government in order to loot the public treasury and pillage the public trust.

Governing is not about, well, governing. It is a mad scramble to see how much of the public treasury you can make off and how many permanent advantages you can vote yourself with before the public catches on and throws you out. Thus, they regard any talk about the government improving the nation or the lives of the people in it as fundamentally dishonest. It is just one of the many customary lies that political parties tell people in order to gain their trust so you can betray that trust later.

Since they see the role of government as primarily one of redistributing wealth from one group or stratum of society to another, their primary concern is to make sure that it is they who are sitting in the Brinks truck that is backed up to the U.S. Treasury. Despite their much publicized preference for “smaller” government, there is actually no size of government that the Republicans would find acceptable. As they discovered in the years between Reagan and Bush II, the bigger government is the more lucrative opportunities it offers for profits and plunder through the privatization and outsourcing of its functions.

“Smaller government” is really a code term for ineffectual government. When the government is an honest beat cop, they can’t get away with much. But when cop on the beat is on the take, they can fleece the public like it’s almost legal. The trick, then, is to convince the public that it is normal and natural for governments to be corrupt, so they might as well do away with regulation altogether, and let the efficient market and Nature take its course; i.e., let the rich continue to grow richer until they become an aristocracy of wealth that owns the country outright, while the rest of us “commoners” struggle to keep from drowning in a sea of debt.

Thomas Frank, in his book,The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule describes how this plutocatization done. First, replace the all the dedicated career civil servants whose years of experience and actual expertise might prove useful with third-rate party hacks, wild-eyed ideologues, and people from industry who are hostile to the regulatory mission of the agency. Next, “starve the beast,” by underfunding and understaffing the agency, so that it becomes so dysfunctional that nobody in their right mind would want to work there. Then, deliberately enact programs that cannot possibly work, and then when they fail, blame it on the inability of government to do anything right. And, keep on repeating this process until there is no effective government left and nobody is sorry to see it go.

At this point, unaccountable corporate CEOs will be making policies formerly made by elected officials, and it will be implemented by the hidden hand of the corporation using its vast wealth to work its will on unregulated markets.

We have the government that the republicans wanted. It is ineffectual because they made a special effort to appoint the least effective leaders. They even transferred some of those people to permanent civil service jobs the keep the decline going while they are out of power.

What the republican leadership really want is a government malleable enough to insure that their corporate bosses actually run the government and brand dissenters as traitors.

They retained control over the supreme court, have civil service locked in a death grip, all they need is to privatize Social Security to sweep up the remaining money and power. Future elections will be a lock for the corporate elite and you can expect that all institutions, including prisons, police, medical centers, and the military will be run for profit. Best yet, we all get to pay for it while having no voice in the system.

I guess it will become a real Dickens novel type “greedocracy”.

Im a pretty savvy and street-smart guy, but when it comes to politics, I think I’m pretty naive. Despite it all, I still want to believe that at least some politicians are working for the “greater good”.

Then I read a beautiful answer like @Zuma‘s above and I realize how wrong I am.

Great answer @Zuma.

now I’m gonna go put a shotgun in my mouth

@cprevite :: He is the only one that doesn’t make me want to put my fist into a wall.

edit :: and DeFazio.. But I have a bit of bias. My sister was his admin assistant for a few years and I fixed his computers when needed. We still get Christmas cards from him.

There is, as @Zuma implies, such a thing as the common good, but we seem to have lost sight of the fact. We have become polarized into an us versus them mentality. The purpose of government is to promote the common good. For example, many people think that school taxes should just be about paying for their kids to go to school. Not so. It is about having an educated population that can be more productive, which is to everybody’s benefit.

John Yarmuth donates his congressional salary to charity.

To most Republicans smaller government means an easier time opening and running a business – fewer hurdles to getting a license, less operating costs and regulation. Note that I said less, not none.

It means lower taxes so that people can keep larger percentages of their paychecks. It means government doesn’t spend money subsidizing things and most especially doesn’t make laws that make things easier for one group at the expense of another – once such laws are established they are endlessly tinkered with when different lawmakers are elected.

Smaller government is also about the government not employing so many people. Government employees don’t generate wealth, that is to say they don’t spend time and money farming crops or manufacturing widgets and then sell the output at a profit. Government employees are instead paid by taxing the farmers and manufacturers – in effect taking part of the labor of one group and paying another group with it.

Again, some of this is necessary, even vital.

Every penny that goes to a government employee comes from the pocket of a standard worker. That is to say; you.

Republicans believe you should either get to keep your tax money or get good value for it.

@johnpowell Bush did indeed expand the government and even worse, he expanded entitlements. Most honest Republicans will tell you that they thought he betrayed them. I cannot speak to Reagan’s alleged expansion of government as I wasn’t paying much attention in those days. If that expansion is about the military then we’re kind of talking about different things.

A corporate state. Raw, dog-eat-dog, robber-baron capitalism. The top 1% get the pie and everyone else fights over the crumbs. A civil war in the making.

@Factotum “Republicans believe you should either get to keep your tax money or get good value for it.”

No, that’s just the sucker bait they put out for public consumption. When they get in control, when they propose legislation, or when they attempt to change legislation, their sole aim is to sabotage government in order to discredit it and, if possible, get rid of it altogether. The absolute last thing they care about is about taxpayers getting value for money, because if they did, people would realize that there are some things that government can do well. See the Thomas Frank book I cited above, or James Galbraith’s The Predator State.

We were discussing this in my history class the other night. Teacher was telling us about back in the late 1800s when there was a worker rally supporting the adoption of the 8-hour work day. Cops came in and killed some of the rally-goers, and one of the ralliers threw a bomb and killed some cops.

“Why didn’t the government step in? What was the President doing at the time?” asked one of the students.

“The Presidents around this time were pretty feeble,” explained the prof. “There weren’t any government regulations for things like safety, for example. In fact, the biggest expense that the Government had was the post office. This was before things like Social Security, and the Post Office was an even bigger expense than the military. So the Government didn’t feel it was their job to protect the workers. Government was very small. All those people nowadays that think Government should be small, this is what it would look like.”

I don’t get it, every time the right starts talking about decreasing government spending they say, except for military spending. I think that if the republicans didn’t put third rate leadership in important departments like HEW, treasury, and privatize anything they could get away with, we wouldn’t have the trouble we have now.

The republicans never decreased the size of government. They even started a medicare drug bill that made bargaining for drug prices illegal. The talk a good game but are worst stewards of our tax money than any democrat that has been in office.

@laureth I must take issue with the idea that this nasty occurrence would be the whole picture of the US without strong government. It wasn’t even the whole picture of the US when it happened.

@Zuma I am a Republican and I know other Republicans. What your two authors are telling you no doubt applies to some Republicans. But that is not what we are about. There are principles. That they are sometimes betrayed…well, that is the story of all political parties as you are no doubt aware.

@Factotum – that incident is what precipitated the conversation. The rest of the post is what I was getting at. Unless you were in the small middle class (10% or so) or in the Carnegie/Morgan set (1%?), it wasn’t a very happy place to be.

People owned their own farms, farmed them how they chose. They were free and not subject to abuse by their government.

No, they weren’t rich. But they were only poor in comparison to these other people. Compared to the poor in England, for example they were rich. They owned land. Damn, that’s cool.

@Factotum Yeah, “sometimes” betrayed. Were you asleep during the whole Bush II administration? They raped the country, and nearly destroyed the world economy before they were unceremoniously routed from power. Do you have some sort of selective amnesia or something? Or do you just get all your news from Fox News?

I’m sure you all believe in “principles” but the point is, the Republicans completely abandon their principles when they get elected. They haven’t stood for “smaller” government for over a decade, not in practice.

Look at how they are acting now. The public option was dropped from the health care bill and they are still saying No to absolutely everything, kicking and screaming like spoiled children, trying to make Obama look bad any way they can. They are they are dragging the country down, and being complete hypocrites all the while.

Just because you have some idea in your mind of what you think Republicans are ought to be doesn’t mean that they are anything like that. The ideal and the real are two different things. Go read either of those very well documented books (or any contemporary politics book not put out by the right) and tell me how it isn’t so.

@Factotum – Farming back then (especially on the plains) was no picnic. Without price supports, they overproduced and crashed the price of their crops, and the only way to make money to pay for the loan they took out for seed was to overproduce some more, causing the price to fall further, leaving them in poverty and sometimes landless. Because there was no regulation of the railroads, they could be thoroughly shivved in shipping costs. Yes, you owned your land (maybe) because you got some through the government’s homestead act (mmm, government program!), but it went poorly for them from the get-go.

@laureth The other government program was the funny money the states were passing out. There are market forces that would also keep the RRs from overcharging – they had to have something to ship after all. I’m not saying it was perfect. It was a rough life and there were a lot of people who didn’t win. But they got to play, and they still owned the land and for the most part could subsist. It was certainly an improvement over where they started.

@Zuma I don’t watch Fox news.

Some politicians abandon their principles and some don’t. Why you think Republicans are evil is your concern as is your curious reading list.

No I was here during the Bush years and your analysis is tedious at best. How do you ‘rape’ a country? How did he ‘nearly destroy the world economy’?

How is it that Democrats can vote lock-step for the extremely flawed Health Care bills(s) and you accuse the Republicans of towing the party line? Surely both groups are or neither is.

‘Dragging the entire country down’? Dude, you’re really convinced your side is puppydogs and rainbows. I imagine it helps come election time.

And by the way, Obama doesn’t need the help of Republicans to look bad – check his polls.

@Factotum Do you watch any news at all?

How do you rape a country? Well, for starters, you start an unnecessary war at the behest of your oilmen cronies that drives the price of oil up, and you let the oil companies rape the American consumer to the tune of up to $4 a gallon. Then you outsource the war to companies providing mercenaries and logistical support, turning it into a for-profit bonanza for Halliburton, Blackwater and a few other favored Bush cronies, and you pass the half trillion dollar cost (for 2009 alone) on to future generations .

How do you nearly destroy the world economy? First, you give the green light to the lending industry to engage in predatory lending practices (meanwhile you roll back the bankruptcy laws so that people can’t escape these debts). Then you defund and understaff the regulatory agencies so that there are no cops on the beat when predatory lenders turn to predatory foreclosures, collapsing the entire real estate market nationwide. Then you do absolutely NOTHING!!! while the collapsing real estate markets bring down the secondary real estate securities markets, which, in turn, bring down the derivative and insurance swaps markets. And you sit on your thumbs while it spreads first to your national banking system and then banks worldwide. And you continue to do NOTHING!!! while the whole world economy is circling the drain, and then you PANIC, and give $750 billion to the banks with no questions asked and no requirement that there even be an accounting for where the money went (thereby raping the taxpayer once again).

How do you run the country down? How about running up a $1.3 billion deficit by not paying for two wars and a giant expansion of Medicare drug benefits (that actually benefits the drug companies more than it does the seniors)? How about the Bush Administration’s many impeachable offenses in dismantling the constitutional checks and balances of our democracy—its domestic wiretaps and massive domestic (i.e., political) surveillance (see Palast above); the suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrarily holding people without charges and torturing them in violation of international law etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

And that was just the Bush II Administration. Before him was Nixon and Watergate, then there was Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair, then there was Bush I’s cozy relations with Manuel Noriega and helping him facilitate the drug trade. And what was the worst thing that Carter did? He had lust in his heart. And Clinton? He got his cigar smoked on company time. On the scales of evil, there is absolutely no comparison at all!

And let us not forget the Enron scandal, the vast Jack Abramoff scandal, the outing of Valerie Plame, and the outrageous hypocrisy of the Republicans in literally dozens of sex scandals.

The Democrats vote lock step? What planet are you on? Have you not heard of the Blue Dog Democrats? Or Joe Lieberman (who, frankly, I think is one of yours.) The bill is currently stalled in the House because it has been so compromised to accommodate Republicans that it is no longer reform in many people’s eyes. The only folks that have been voting lockstep are the Republicans, and they have—to a person, vote voted No on every single vote (except for Olympia Snow, one time in committee, and one other guy, and they caught hell for it).

And is the health care reform plan “extremely flawed”? (Like the present state of affairs isn’t.) No, the plan is more or less what the Republicans said they wanted when they objected to the Clinton plan. The Republicans are voting for the flawed status quo! Name one “flaw” in the bill that wasn’t introduced to accommodate the Republicans.

Excellent answer, @Zuma!

We would be one step closer to living our lives the way we want, and not the way they want.

Josie, by “they,” do you mean the government? maybe so. But I believe that without government legislation and protections, it still wouldn’t be living the way we want – it would be closer to what the biggest, richest corporations want.

@laureth By “they”, I mean the government. Regarding corporations- If they produced something that we did not want, they would not be big or rich.

For example, Wal*Mart. They produce cheap crap that breaks, which is what people want so they buy tons of it. However, that’s not the only reason Wal*Mart is big and rich – they also have been known to hire illegals, bleed suppliers dry, drive competition out of business, and squeeze their labor until they squeak. Government regulations serve to keep some of that in check (if it’s done right), but with smaller, less regulatory government, we have Wal*Mart Unchained – who would, likelier than not, engage in even shadier business practices. Wal*Mart got that way just as much by being tricksy and crappy as they did by importing cheap plastic crap that people want to buy – especially since they drove the competition out of town and pay their labor so little that sometimes they have to save up to afford Wal*Mart clothes. Clear?

@laureth well said !!!!

@laureth The other reason Wal-Mart is so pernicious is that they have a contracted with the Chinese Government to sell their goods in America at a rock bottom price. They are, in effect, throwing the American worker into direct competition with Chinese sweatshop labor, where the workers are commonly locked in, and sleep in dormitories. They also have no worker safety protections, no environmental laws; and, of course, no unions. They also use prison and child labor. When a new Wal-Mart opens, it sells below even its own low cost, driving all local competitors out. At the mere mention of a union, they call in professional union busters. Pay is so low at Wal-mart, that its employees qualify for food stamps and often other forms of welfare.

…And that’s one thing we’ll get with smaller government.

Then I suggest that you not shop at Wal-Mart, and that you lobby big government to lower corporate taxes, reform labor laws etc. in order for businesses to be able to afford to higher (expensive) American workers. Furthermore, consider lobbying big government to stop spending money that it does not have. Because as it is, big, expensive, government must borrow money from the Chinese who then have a basis for coercing the government into ignoring their ongoing and despicable human rights violations. ...And that is another thing we’ll get with smaller government.

I don’t shop at Wal*Mart, but it hasn’t really made much of a dent in their total sales. I do lobby my congresscritters to not spend money they don’t have, but the new ruling (mostly by conservative judges in the SCOTUS) that corporations are people too and now may contribute unlimited funds to (probably pro-biz Republican candidates) means that my voice is weaker than it was before. Besides, most of the money that we don’t have has been spent on two big wars and a big prescription drug benefit that were the darlings of the small-government Republicans. If that’s the kind of small government that you like too, I’d hate to see big government! ;)

@laureth I never personally said that the Republicans want smaller government. It was either answer the question as is, or let it go. Sounds like you would have been happier if I had let it go. I thought it was a good conversational question. And since I am not a Republican, I do not care either way. Washington said “Government is like fire-a handy servant and a dangerous master.” I agree with the second half of the statement.

I guess I agree with both halves. In the best of all worlds, the government does for the people what it can’t do for themselves, as Lincoln said. Protection from internal forces, as well as external, I see as one of those things. Separately we are small, but together (as government), we are big.

The goverment is not us. The Ancients began the concept of government when they hired the bandits that were stealing their crops and animals, and gave them a cut of their product in exchange for protection against other bandits. They always took the risk that the hired bandits might keep asking for more, and someday they would not be able to get rid of them. The principle has never changed. I would never imagine that the government is looking out for your interests or mine as their primary mission. They are looking out for their popularity, their perks, their power and influence and their place in history. When they get done with that, they might give lip service to you and me. I am not an anti government kook-neither history, nor I can think of something else. But I would worry if I thought too many people actually trusted it.

@Zuma Let me start by saying that my question regarding raping a country and destroying the world economy was rhetorical. Rape is something men do to women. Using ‘rape’ as a metaphor for use or even misuse of power on a national level is weak at best unless you’re talking about something on the order of the Rape of Nanking.

The world economy is still with us. You might have a case with ‘damaged’ or ‘harmed’ but the world economy was not destroyed.

Now on to your link-fest.

Bush was an oilman. That doesn’t make him a tool of oil people. Unless you think Obama is a tool of activist groups and lawyers. One can certainly argue that both groups have benefited under the Obama ‘regime’.

Oil shortages mean people want it and will pay more but they also mean that people cut back when they can and don’t buy at all when their local gas station runs out. That doesn’t necessarily translate to huge profits. Even if it did, our alleged willingness to go to war over oil (there were numerous other reasons to go to war in Iraq) helps keep other countries from overcharging.

As for Halliburton and Blackwater, which companies do you think should have been doing their jobs instead? I’m no fan of either company and I’m not here to defend their actions but Blackwater was hired by the State Department as bodyguards – a mission the military is not capable of doing – and support – something the military used to have the manpower to do but lost as various administrations opted to reduce military spending. Blackwater operatives are currently working for Triple Canopy – the group our current President’s State Department has hired.

Wars always cost future generations. That has nothing to do with Bush. Congress signed onto the war. Moreover our current president seems to think that at least one of those wars is still worth fighting. This is an American war, not a Republican war.

There is no such thing as predatory lending practices. There are bad contract offers. Such offers shouldn’t be signed. All sorts of people will push paper at you that ‘might’ make you rich but the risk is huge. People who are eighteen years old or older are responsible for what they sign.

Bush certainly contributed to the recession as did many of his predecessors for whom ‘getting people into homes’ was viewed as a moral calling. He was aided by a willing legislature with Obama in it. The article you linked to credits Bush with trying to rein in Fannie and Freddie, something Rep. Barney Frank didn’t do despite being the Chairman of the committee that oversaw them.

Regarding Bush’s $700 billion dollars TARP, $500 billion has been repaid (the remaining $200 was loaned to Fannie and Freddie no doubt we’ll see it back real soon).

For all the claims of impeachable offenses I hear bandied about I notice he wasn’t impeached. I know that it is popular on the left to maintain that he is a war criminal etc. but there doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to prosecute including Obama and the majority Dem. House and Senate.

The rest of your links have nothing at all to do with either with Republicans favoring smaller government or with Bush’s presidency but are instead a laundry list of stuff loosely associated with some Republican somewhere.

You asked for one flaw in the health care plan: a lack of governmental authority to penalize a citizen for not buying health insurance.

A more important flaw is that we simply can’t afford it. Because we’re in a recession.

@Factotum It kind of helps if you read the actual read the documentation provided in the links rather than dismissing them categorically out of hand and pretending that your alternative reality is in fact real.

“Bush not a tool of the oilmen.” False. Bush’s oil cronies hijacked whole segments of Bush’s War on Terror, of which the war in Iraq was one initiative.

“Oil shortages mean people want it and will pay more… That doesn’t necessarily translate to huge profits.” False. False. False.

“Blackwater was hired by the State Department as bodyguards – a mission the military is not capable of doing – and support – something the military used to have the manpower to do but lost as various administrations opted to reduce military spending.”

False. They are not just bodyguards, they outnumber the regular military, they are a virtual mercenary army, they are doing things that regular military has traditionally done, and it adds significantly to the cost of our wars because there is no effective oversight and little accountability to the military command structure. The primary goal of these companies is to maximize profit.

“Wars always cost future generations.” False, we paid for the Vietnam war. And, under Obama, our wars are now being budgeted for in the regular budget, rather than charged to the national credit card (i.e., through funding under continuing resolution appropriations bills).

“For all the claims of impeachable offenses I hear bandied about I notice he wasn’t impeached.” The reason Bush II wasn’t impeached wasn’t for lack of impeachable offences or serious charges it was due to the fact that both houses of Congress were controlled by his Republican enablers.

“There is no such thing as predatory lending practices.” False, false, false!

“You asked for one flaw in the health care plan: a lack of governmental authority to penalize a citizen for not buying health insurance.” False. The authority is in the legislation itself.

“A more important flaw is that we simply can’t afford it. Because we’re in a recession.” False. We currently have the most expensive and wasteful systems in the world, and it is only going to get worse. The CBO projected cost savings of the current bill is between $100 billion and $169 billion over the next 10 years.

Colorado Springs, CO, has been a city held up as a fine example of a government that keeps taxes low and government small. I found this article about what small government means to the residents of Colorado Springs.

“More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July . . .”

I suppose you get what you ask for.