Why should government be kept smaller, and restricted to only certain tasks?

[HelenaHandbag]

ask yourselves one simple question. Is it your life or is it the governments? government is way to involved in our personal decisions.

ask yourself another simple question. With the infrastructure the government has and the massive reach between agencies, why is everything so expensive and poorly coordinated? No private enterprise could stay in existence if it ran as inefficiently as the government. Yet we let the government spend, excuse me, waste our tax dollars with out question. then we allow them to increase our debt ceiling and put our futures at risk. our government is more corrupt than the mafia. would you let the mafia run your lives?

Private enterprise is interested in two things. Making money off of us and getting the government to subsidize their making money off us

Ask yourself a simple question. Who do you trust more? A private company or a government that you have direct accountability over?

Ask yourself two simple questions:

• Why do you stand for private enterprise mooching off of the government?
  
• Since when do you, or anyone else for that matter, have any direct accountability over any politicians or bureaucrats?

Many of the functions in our society are better executed at the government level

Better executed by whose estimation and criteria?

 

[Foxfyre]

Excellent exchange. The real issue here is finding consensus on the purpose of government - that's where the disagreement lies.

May I answer it?

When the federal government does more than it is Constitutionally mandated to do:

1. It requires funding, infrastructure, staffing, equipment and supplies all of which it must obligate the taxpayer to provide whether the taxpayer wants the program or project or not. And invariably when the program or project has run its course and/or outlived its usefulness, the government might find something to do and expand itself to include that something else, but it never scales itself back to the original size. It just doesn't have the balls to give up the power, prestige, influence, and personal increase in wealth that it provides.

2. The federal government by its very nature gets bogged down in excessive rules and regulations and processes and procedures that greatly reduces both its efficiency and effectiveness. Sometimes it gets so involved in just following the process, it loses sight of what it intends to accomplish entirely. It can spend months and years of expensive planning and writing and rewriting how the process will be done only to decide not to do it. Then those in government just shrug, don't give another thought to all that wasted money, and move on to something else that they probably won't accomplish either.

3. The system is designed to be wasteful because any department or agency that does not spend all its budget will have that budget reduced. So they find anything and everything to spend money on to be sure nothing is left at the end of the fiscal year and therefore they will merit a hefty increase. The bigger the budget, the more the people in charge merit in pay. Result? The government owns countless acres - square miles even - of unused land, buildings, and warehouses full of barely or never used and never will be used furniture, furnishings, equipment, and suppies.

4. The system is designed to increase the power, prestige, influence, and personal wealth of those elected, appointed, or hired to run the government, and that is a huge incentive for corruption, graft, and payola that funnels money directly to those same people or to those who will fund their campaigns and/or vote to keep them in office. It is corrupted to both those in government and those the government pays to keep itself there.

5. The government is inefficient and ineffective and excessively expensive whenever it does ANYTHING that can be done by the private sector.

6. Every dime the government spends it has to take out of the economy or obligate future taxpayers to pay. And when the government is growing and prospering more than the private sector is growing and prospering, it is a mathematical certainly that the government will increase while the private sector decreases until there is little or no private sector left.

Thank you for your honest and well thought out response. I wish other posters on this thread would emulate you

We function better as a society than we do as a bunch of individuals struggling to survive. A society makes us stronger and better able to function. They provide us with security, take care of the weaker members, infrastructure. We also ask our society to provide free education, monitor our food and water supplies, provide healthcare for those who can't afford it as well as thousands of other tasks.

We established a Constitutional government to execute those societal functions. We give them broad latitude to do what needs to be done. We decide what we need our government to do through the election process. That process decides how big or how small a government we need and what functions we want them to perform

My answer to the question is different than Foxy's. For me, the need for restricting government's scope and reach has nothing to do with its inherent efficiency or wastefulness. Even if we could streamline government and eliminate all corruption, I'd still want to see it explicitly limited to certain functions. For me, it comes down to the fact that the essential means of government is coercion. That's what distinguishes it from all other social institutions.

The libertarian ethos is based on the idea that the primary threat to social stability is the initiation of force to achieve our ends - i.e. bullying is bad. The concept of government rests on the assumption that the only way to deal with a bully is to respond in kind. We create government as an organized means of self-defense. From that perspective, the only justifiable use of government force is in achieving that end.

Hmm.... It occurs to me I could bloviate about this for several more paragraphs, but it's Thanksgiving. So, I'll sum up for now by saying that government should only be used in situations where the application of violent force is justified. As a simple litmus test, if you can morally justifying killing someone who stands in the way of something the government is trying to do, it's probably a proper function of government. Otherwise, we should look for better alternatives that embrace voluntary cooperation.

Actually I did at least indirectly, address your concern with #4 on my list. The power and corruption--too much of one almost always goes hand in hand with the other--is a critical component of the mix. Once the government is able to bribe enough people to keep government in power, no matter how bad that government is, goernment becomes invincible. A government big enough and with sufficient license and ability to bribe us and make us believe it can provide us with anything we need or want, is a government with the power to do anything to us that it chooses. And we all know that a totalitarian government cannot help itself. It will be a bully.

 

[Foxfyre]

ask yourselves one simple question. Is it your life or is it the governments? government is way to involved in our personal decisions.

ask yourself another simple question. With the infrastructure the government has and the massive reach between agencies, why is everything so expensive and poorly coordinated? No private enterprise could stay in existence if it ran as inefficiently as the government. Yet we let the government spend, excuse me, waste our tax dollars with out question. then we allow them to increase our debt ceiling and put our futures at risk. our government is more corrupt than the mafia. would you let the mafia run your lives?

Private enterprise is interested in two things. Making money off of us and getting the government to subsidize their making money off us

Ask yourself a simple question. Who do you trust more? A private company or a government that you have direct accountability over?

Ask yourself two simple questions:

• Why do you stand for private enterprise mooching off of the government?
  
• Since when do you, or anyone else for that matter, have any direct accountability over any politicians or bureaucrats?

Many of the functions in our society are better executed at the government level

Better executed by whose estimation and criteria?

Notwithstanding is the functional error RW made in his comment. Private enterprise is 99% interested primarily in making money, period. It is self serving and works for its own interests and, in doing so, benefits everybody else.

Private enterprise is no fool and will accept whatever freebies it can get. And because some in private enterprise are no saints, at least some will utilize whatever means they can to bribe government to favor them. And a corrupt government will do so in order to keep itself in power with all the authority, prestige, and increase in personal wealth for those in government.

So the problem is not in private enterprise. The problem is in a too large, too overreaching, and too corrupt government with the ability to misuse its power in that way and unrestricted power to take and give bribes. That is the primary reason I advocate a small, lean government restricted to certain constitutionally mandated tasks and doing NOTHING else.

 

[HelenaHandbag]

Private enterprise is interested in two things. Making money off of us and getting the government to subsidize their making money off us

Ask yourself a simple question. Who do you trust more? A private company or a government that you have direct accountability over?

Ask yourself two simple questions:

• Why do you stand for private enterprise mooching off of the government?
  
• Since when do you, or anyone else for that matter, have any direct accountability over any politicians or bureaucrats?

Many of the functions in our society are better executed at the government level

Better executed by whose estimation and criteria?

Notwithstanding is the functional error RW made in his comment. Private enterprise is 99% interested primarily in making money, period. It is self serving and works for its own interests and, in doing so, benefits everybody else.

Private enterprise is no fool and will accept whatever freebies it can get. And because some in private enterprise are no saints, at least some will utilize whatever means they can to bribe government to favor them. And a corrupt government will do so in order to keep itself in power with all the authority, prestige, and increase in personal wealth for those in government.

So the problem is not in private enterprise. The problem is in a too large, too overreaching, and too corrupt government with the ability to misuse its power in that way and unrestricted power to take and give bribes. That is the primary reason I advocate a small, lean government restricted to certain constitutionally mandated tasks and doing NOTHING else.

Everybody is self serving. It's human nature.

The problem is that the only tool at the disposal of government is compulsion, whereas business has to appeal to your sense of self interest to sell you their product. You can refuse to take your business to a certain company, but government makes you the offer you can't refuse.

Therefore, the more power a central government assumes, the less ethical politicians and bureaucrats will be attracted to it, seeking the power of compulsion over others to meet their own self interests.

Both F.A Hyek and Frederic Bastiat wrote extensively on this particularly nefarious aspect of the political machine.

 

[jasonnfree]

Ask yourself two simple questions:

• Why do you stand for private enterprise mooching off of the government?
  
• Since when do you, or anyone else for that matter, have any direct accountability over any politicians or bureaucrats?

Better executed by whose estimation and criteria?

Notwithstanding is the functional error RW made in his comment. Private enterprise is 99% interested primarily in making money, period. It is self serving and works for its own interests and, in doing so, benefits everybody else.

Private enterprise is no fool and will accept whatever freebies it can get. And because some in private enterprise are no saints, at least some will utilize whatever means they can to bribe government to favor them. And a corrupt government will do so in order to keep itself in power with all the authority, prestige, and increase in personal wealth for those in government.

So the problem is not in private enterprise. The problem is in a too large, too overreaching, and too corrupt government with the ability to misuse its power in that way and unrestricted power to take and give bribes. That is the primary reason I advocate a small, lean government restricted to certain constitutionally mandated tasks and doing NOTHING else.

Everybody is self serving. It's human nature.

The problem is that the only tool at the disposal of government is compulsion, whereas business has to appeal to your sense of self interest to sell you their product. You can refuse to take your business to a certain company, but government makes you the offer you can't refuse.

Therefore, the more power a central government assumes, the less ethical politicians and bureaucrats will be attracted to it, seeking the power of compulsion over others to meet their own self interests.

Both F.A Hyek and Frederic Bastiat wrote extensively on this particularly nefarious aspect of the political machine.

After shilling for the free market his whole life, Hayek used our nefarious, unethical government in his medical hour of need. The koch brothers, who's business practices he both admired and inspired, gave him all the info needed to go on medicare and get social security payments. He did pretty good having only paid into SS for ten years.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

I said - and you might want to take notes, since this seems to be confusing you - that I don't think it's the government's job to micromanage social behavior via the tax code, and I don't. That is not necessarily the same thing as acknowledging that certain activities are necessary to the function of society - such as providing housing for one's family - and should therefore not be interfered with by a tax code that's already onerous and intrusive. And as long as ANYONE paying a mortgage has the law applied to him in the exact same way as ANYONE ELSE paying a mortgage, it is equal under the law. It does NOT become unequal simply because people who rent instead aren't eligible. It is definitely a far cry from the individual mandate, which forces people to purchase something whether they want it or not.

No it's pretty much exactly the same. Like the mandate, the mortgage deduction doesn't address what it claims to. Whereas ACA pretends to be addressing the high costs of health care, and is really about pushing us all into buying insurance, the mortgage deduction doesn't exempt housing costs - it exempts mortgage interest, pushing all of us into debt. If it exempted basic housing costs for everyone, your argument might have merit. But it doesn't.

It does not push people into debt anymore than offering lower interest rates than a competitor pushes people into borrowing from one bank over another. It does make debt a bit less scary, but it is not going to be the deciding factor in the decision on whether or not to buy a house.

 

[HelenaHandbag]

Notwithstanding is the functional error RW made in his comment. Private enterprise is 99% interested primarily in making money, period. It is self serving and works for its own interests and, in doing so, benefits everybody else.

Private enterprise is no fool and will accept whatever freebies it can get. And because some in private enterprise are no saints, at least some will utilize whatever means they can to bribe government to favor them. And a corrupt government will do so in order to keep itself in power with all the authority, prestige, and increase in personal wealth for those in government.

So the problem is not in private enterprise. The problem is in a too large, too overreaching, and too corrupt government with the ability to misuse its power in that way and unrestricted power to take and give bribes. That is the primary reason I advocate a small, lean government restricted to certain constitutionally mandated tasks and doing NOTHING else.

Everybody is self serving. It's human nature.

The problem is that the only tool at the disposal of government is compulsion, whereas business has to appeal to your sense of self interest to sell you their product. You can refuse to take your business to a certain company, but government makes you the offer you can't refuse.

Therefore, the more power a central government assumes, the less ethical politicians and bureaucrats will be attracted to it, seeking the power of compulsion over others to meet their own self interests.

Both F.A Hyek and Frederic Bastiat wrote extensively on this particularly nefarious aspect of the political machine.

After shilling for the free market his whole life, Hayek used our nefarious, unethical government in his medical hour of need. The koch brothers, who's business practices he both admired and inspired, gave him all the info needed to go on medicare and get social security payments. He did pretty good having only paid into SS for ten years.

Oh, so he did in fact pay in, just like the millions of other Americans who got more in SS benefits than they paid in.

You are dismissed.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

ask yourselves one simple question. Is it your life or is it the governments? government is way to involved in our personal decisions.

ask yourself another simple question. With the infrastructure the government has and the massive reach between agencies, why is everything so expensive and poorly coordinated? No private enterprise could stay in existence if it ran as inefficiently as the government. Yet we let the government spend, excuse me, waste our tax dollars with out question. then we allow them to increase our debt ceiling and put our futures at risk. our government is more corrupt than the mafia. would you let the mafia run your lives?

Private enterprise is interested in two things. Making money off of us and getting the government to subsidize their making money off us

Ask yourself a simple question. Who do you trust more? A private company or a government that you have direct accountability over?

Many of the functions in our society are better executed at the government level

And, if we had a government that was limited in size and scope so it couldn't subsidize business at the expense of everyone else, you wouldn't have to worry about the blithering idiocy that is government subsidizing private enterprise.

 

[dblack]

I said - and you might want to take notes, since this seems to be confusing you - that I don't think it's the government's job to micromanage social behavior via the tax code, and I don't. That is not necessarily the same thing as acknowledging that certain activities are necessary to the function of society - such as providing housing for one's family - and should therefore not be interfered with by a tax code that's already onerous and intrusive. And as long as ANYONE paying a mortgage has the law applied to him in the exact same way as ANYONE ELSE paying a mortgage, it is equal under the law. It does NOT become unequal simply because people who rent instead aren't eligible. It is definitely a far cry from the individual mandate, which forces people to purchase something whether they want it or not.

No it's pretty much exactly the same. Like the mandate, the mortgage deduction doesn't address what it claims to. Whereas ACA pretends to be addressing the high costs of health care, and is really about pushing us all into buying insurance, the mortgage deduction doesn't exempt housing costs - it exempts mortgage interest, pushing all of us into debt. If it exempted basic housing costs for everyone, your argument might have merit. But it doesn't.

It does not push people into debt anymore than offering lower interest rates than a competitor pushes people into borrowing from one bank over another. It does make debt a bit less scary, but it is not going to be the deciding factor in the decision on whether or not to buy a house.

No, it does so in exactly the same way the individual mandate does - by taxing them more if they don't do as the 'incentive' requires. This is exactly why Roberts ruled as he did. He recognized that the mandate was the equivalent of a tax incentive and to rule against it would have undermined all similar incentives. If you're opposed to the individual mandate because it orders people to buy insurance or be fined, then to be consistent you have to be opposed to the mortgage interest deduction because it operates in exactly the same way.

 

[jasonnfree]

Everybody is self serving. It's human nature.

The problem is that the only tool at the disposal of government is compulsion, whereas business has to appeal to your sense of self interest to sell you their product. You can refuse to take your business to a certain company, but government makes you the offer you can't refuse.

Therefore, the more power a central government assumes, the less ethical politicians and bureaucrats will be attracted to it, seeking the power of compulsion over others to meet their own self interests.

Both F.A Hyek and Frederic Bastiat wrote extensively on this particularly nefarious aspect of the political machine.

After shilling for the free market his whole life, Hayek used our nefarious, unethical government in his medical hour of need. The koch brothers, who's business practices he both admired and inspired, gave him all the info needed to go on medicare and get social security payments. He did pretty good having only paid into SS for ten years.

Oh, so he did in fact pay in, just like the millions of other Americans who got more in SS benefits than they paid in.

You are dismissed.

No, I was just commenting on your anti government rants and the failure of the free market to take care of one of it's advocates you happened to mention. So he did pay in. Good. It can be like an insurance program. What have you got against our government helping others? Compelling them to pay a certain amount in taxes?

 

[HelenaHandbag]

After shilling for the free market his whole life, Hayek used our nefarious, unethical government in his medical hour of need. The koch brothers, who's business practices he both admired and inspired, gave him all the info needed to go on medicare and get social security payments. He did pretty good having only paid into SS for ten years.

Oh, so he did in fact pay in, just like the millions of other Americans who got more in SS benefits than they paid in.

You are dismissed.

No, I was just commenting on your anti government rants and the failure of the free market to take care of one of it's advocates you happened to mention.

Pointing out the nature of the government's monopoly on the proactive use of compulsion is somehow an anti-government rant?

Hayek getting the money taken from him, under threat of force, returned is a a failure of the free market?

What the Sam Hill are you incoherently rambling about?

 

[boedicca]

In response to the question in the thread title:

If monopolies in the private sector in which transactions are voluntary are bad, then a SuperSized Government Monopoly With Guns and the powers to tax, fine, and imprison is VERY BAD

 

[Cecilie1200]

I said - and you might want to take notes, since this seems to be confusing you - that I don't think it's the government's job to micromanage social behavior via the tax code, and I don't. That is not necessarily the same thing as acknowledging that certain activities are necessary to the function of society - such as providing housing for one's family - and should therefore not be interfered with by a tax code that's already onerous and intrusive. And as long as ANYONE paying a mortgage has the law applied to him in the exact same way as ANYONE ELSE paying a mortgage, it is equal under the law. It does NOT become unequal simply because people who rent instead aren't eligible. It is definitely a far cry from the individual mandate, which forces people to purchase something whether they want it or not.

No it's pretty much exactly the same. Like the mandate, the mortgage deduction doesn't address what it claims to. Whereas ACA pretends to be addressing the high costs of health care, and is really about pushing us all into buying insurance, the mortgage deduction doesn't exempt housing costs - it exempts mortgage interest, pushing all of us into debt. If it exempted basic housing costs for everyone, your argument might have merit. But it doesn't.

Shockingly, when I'm talking about what I think and believe, I'm not necessarily talking about what the government currently DOES. So telling me that the mortgage deduction doesn't do what I think it should do is an utter waste of everyone's time. Likewise, telling me what ACA is doing as though I have somehow indicated that I believe otherwise is wasting my time indulging your ego.

If you can find somewhere that I have said I think the government is. at this moment, doing what it should, for the correct motivations, then perhaps this post would have been worth the time effort to post and read. Since you can't, it wasn't.

 

[Cecilie1200]

ask yourselves one simple question. Is it your life or is it the governments? government is way to involved in our personal decisions.

ask yourself another simple question. With the infrastructure the government has and the massive reach between agencies, why is everything so expensive and poorly coordinated? No private enterprise could stay in existence if it ran as inefficiently as the government. Yet we let the government spend, excuse me, waste our tax dollars with out question. then we allow them to increase our debt ceiling and put our futures at risk. our government is more corrupt than the mafia. would you let the mafia run your lives?

Spoon, you gotta remember that the answer to the first question is different for leftists and conservatives. And that makes the answers to every other question different.

 

[OnePercenter]

Note that the field on the right is labeled "Total INCOME"

So the money that the checker puts in the cash register isn't INCOME?

Okay, seriously. Are you REALLY this obtuse, or are you just goofing on us to see if we'll believe someone can be this dumb and still operate a keyboard?

Revenue, gross income, and total income are the same thing.

 

[boedicca]

How is government more corrupt than the mafia?

When the Mafia steals from one, they don't pretend to be altruistic and to claim that it's for some fake noble purpose.

Just sayin'.

 

[percysunshine]

Government is necessary for some things, but should do as little as possible, and should confine itself to important functions that private persons or groups CANNOT DO AT ALL. Examples include National Defense, smoothing the course of interstate commerce with minimal interference in that commerce, conducting foreign relations, setting national standards for money, weights, and measures, dispassionately pursuing and prosecuting criminal behavior, etc.

Occasional events like wars might cause govt departments designed to deal with them, to grow to a size appropriate to do so. But afterward govt must reduce back to its smaller size.

If you feel that government can do something better than private people or groups can do it, that's insufficient reason to grant govt authority to do it. If private people can do it at all, it must be denied to govt unequivocally.

The reason for these restrictions, is that:
(a) Government cannot do anything well, due in part to the fact that no one can compete with it, and will always be rife with sloth and inefficiency;
(b) Government's only ability is to restrict and punish its citizens. This is activity extremely vulnerable to abuse, and capable of damaging and destroying lives by the millions if not carefully watched and restrained.
(c) History grimly shows that when government is allowed more authority than necessary, the imperfect humans it's made of begin to abuse that power, virtually every time. And with time, that abuse only increases, often rising to disastrous levels.

For these reasons, the powers given to government must be carefull spelled out and restricted, with those it restricts retaining full power to change or abolish it.

The governments role is, for domestic purposes, the same as the role of an umpire in a baseball game.

It is not anymore complicated than that.

 

[HelenaHandbag]

How is government more corrupt than the mafia?

When the Mafia steals from one, they don't pretend to be altruistic and to claim that its for some fake noble purpose.

Just sayin'.

With the notable exception of highly localized protection rackets, participating in activities run by the mob is a voluntary act.

Also just sayin'.

 

[Foxfyre]

Government is necessary for some things, but should do as little as possible, and should confine itself to important functions that private persons or groups CANNOT DO AT ALL. Examples include National Defense, smoothing the course of interstate commerce with minimal interference in that commerce, conducting foreign relations, setting national standards for money, weights, and measures, dispassionately pursuing and prosecuting criminal behavior, etc.

Occasional events like wars might cause govt departments designed to deal with them, to grow to a size appropriate to do so. But afterward govt must reduce back to its smaller size.

If you feel that government can do something better than private people or groups can do it, that's insufficient reason to grant govt authority to do it. If private people can do it at all, it must be denied to govt unequivocally.

The reason for these restrictions, is that:
(a) Government cannot do anything well, due in part to the fact that no one can compete with it, and will always be rife with sloth and inefficiency;
(b) Government's only ability is to restrict and punish its citizens. This is activity extremely vulnerable to abuse, and capable of damaging and destroying lives by the millions if not carefully watched and restrained.
(c) History grimly shows that when government is allowed more authority than necessary, the imperfect humans it's made of begin to abuse that power, virtually every time. And with time, that abuse only increases, often rising to disastrous levels.

For these reasons, the powers given to government must be carefull spelled out and restricted, with those it restricts retaining full power to change or abolish it.

The governments role is, for domestic purposes, the same as the role of an umpire in a baseball game.

It is not anymore complicated than that.

That is what the Founders mostly intended the government to be. Unfortunately that principle and concept was thrown out of the window during the Teddy Roosevelt administration and a whole new ballgame has been invented. In the new game, the government writes the rules, provides the coaches, umpires, assigns the teams, and dictates who will get the points as well and cites all that activity as justification for confiscating more and more of the gate receipts until it gets them all.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

No it's pretty much exactly the same. Like the mandate, the mortgage deduction doesn't address what it claims to. Whereas ACA pretends to be addressing the high costs of health care, and is really about pushing us all into buying insurance, the mortgage deduction doesn't exempt housing costs - it exempts mortgage interest, pushing all of us into debt. If it exempted basic housing costs for everyone, your argument might have merit. But it doesn't.

It does not push people into debt anymore than offering lower interest rates than a competitor pushes people into borrowing from one bank over another. It does make debt a bit less scary, but it is not going to be the deciding factor in the decision on whether or not to buy a house.

No, it does so in exactly the same way the individual mandate does - by taxing them more if they don't do as the 'incentive' requires. This is exactly why Roberts ruled as he did. He recognized that the mandate was the equivalent of a tax incentive and to rule against it would have undermined all similar incentives. If you're opposed to the individual mandate because it orders people to buy insurance or be fined, then to be consistent you have to be opposed to the mortgage interest deduction because it operates in exactly the same way.

I do not get taxed more if I don't buy a house. The simple fact is that most people don't itemize, they take a standard deduction. If we eliminated it the only people who would notice are the people who are rich enough that they can afford an accountant to track everything they spend. The reason that politicians are always so eager to defend the deduction is that their rich donors benefit from it.

If you want to argue against the damn thing, which I have, more than once, you should base your argument on reality, not your absurd delusions that the deduction is claimed by everyone who files taxes who doesn't rent.