Why are people afraid of big government?

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Hi all. There is just something I need to talk about for a while because it has been bugging me so much. We are so many people afraid of "big government"?

We can change the government by voting. We can't change what corporations do by voting. Corporations are totalitarian, unaccountable institutions.

If the government seems tyrannical then we don't need to reduce its size. That will just transfer power to private tyranny. Instead, we need to make the government more democratic. For example, why are Supreme Court Justices appointed by the President? Perhaps the people should vote for them instead.

We should vote for the heads of corporations too. All the oppressive organizations in the world need to be put under populist, democratic control.

In the United States, mistrust of the government has happened since early colonialism when the Revolutionary War against the Crown's Troops and even before, with the persecuted pilgrims who were too fanatically religious, they were pariahs open to persecution in England, straight through the penning of the US Constitution and beyond into the post modern era. The inclination toward a smaller, less taxing government with limited powers is strongly felt by many Americans and they feel nowadays, it doesn't exist.

Others believe, the way the Constitution was framed, already protects our rights as countrymen and American government is inherently good because of that, when compared to certain foreign ones.

I don't think that anything will stop them from becoming a dictatorship if they become big enough. No one should have to become dependent on the government because that is when an inbalance of power starts.

A hundred million murder victims, killed by their own big governments, might have something to do with it. Statism = death.

Not sure why this is being couched in terms of "fear". There are plenty of rational reasons to be wary of big government, in both common senses of the phrase.

Our Enemy, the State
https://mises.org/library/our-enemy-state-2

There are plenty of reasons to be wary of any human. What works is a system of checks and balances. The government should be a part of this and so should we. When we hold each other accountable, trust prevails.

Government is nothing more than a collective of humans, similar to any other including corporations, companies societies, religions or nations.

It doesn't work and it leads to the enslavement of people, it inevitably brings tyranny and bloodshed.

You sound almost like an old-school Marxist with your dogmatic inevitability there, Jacoby.


I think the argument against big government is mostly nonsense. Big nations need big governments. Systems automation can help, but any nation with tens or hundreds of millions of citizens needs a large government.

The citizens of such a nation should be constantly vigilant against the tendency for their military, espionage services and police to limit their freedom and checks should be built into the governmental system to prevent this.

But it seems to me that there is a lot of whiny "principled" libertarianism that comes down to "I am selfish and don't want to be taxed for the benefit of others." It seems that a large part of what motivates this impulse to disparage the idea of government is because they just don't want to pay for shared services.

You hear this stuff about how government always kills people, or becomes tyrannical or whatever, but the evidence for this is only other people saying it passionately.

It's funny that you bring up Marxist inevitability as I've read some articles in the last few months that have brought up the 'Whig' interpretation of history that seems very in vogue which holds that human progress towards liberty and enlightenment as inevitable so how different are things really? It seems like a very naive and foolish way of thinking.

There is plenty of evidence and it can be posted in gruesome visual detail if you need it to be, the greatest evils in history have been because of big government.

The more local and decentralized things are the better, the less power somebody has to abuse.

The government making its citizens dependent on its welfare is what causes this division. There are a huge number of people who rely on (or would rather rely on) welfare to maintain their lifestyle. It doesn't matter what evil the side offering to provide that welfare does, but the receiver knows not to bite the hand that feeds.

And the less ability they have to resist abuse from an external source. I can imagine the inhabitants of a city under seige by the Golden Horde, crying out "Thank Goodness we don't exist in a larger state with a standing army!"

People who propose inevitable trajectories for political or historical change of any kind seems to be either engaging in a kind of religious acitivity, either longing for an inevitable heaven or warning people of an inevitable hell.

The Big Government is Intrinsically Evil people seem to favor the hell approach.

Of course, anyone can come up with examples of big governments behaving badly. But such examples do not make a case that big governments inevitably behave badly.

That doesn't really sell big government to me. If the outcome of big government is more often than not a crooked system I believe it is foolish to pursue it in the vein one set of leadership will "get it right this time" under the same model, or to toe a party line.

Find a big government that hasn't acted badly then, that shouldn't be a challenge if it's not inevitable right?

Yes we can and no they aren't. Corporations are bound to the will of the people.

You want to control a corporation? Stop giving them your money, and let them know why. Give it to a better corporation, or start your own. They'll change their behaviour or die.

Obviously there are occasions when this doesn't work, but generally speaking it's as good a system as traditional democracy. It's also much more efficient.

His point has sailed right over your head.