| richardhutnik said: You miss the point, and get what I have been saying backwards. I was saying the government does things that society values (well values at least seeing less so the government deals with it), that society doesn't do on its own. If society did it, government wouldn't be involved. Government doesn't get into things that somewhere the body politic doesn't feel is a problem. What I see here, whether you sign up to this or not isn't even the point, is a belief that you slash government and then somehow the problems will resolve themselves. My take is that the problem doesn't go away simply by slashing government. Cut welfare and housing people, they will funnel elsewhere. The way to shrink government is for society to do things outside of government and make the problems go away. The opposite won't do it. |
I don't believe that to be true. As long as there is imperfection anywhere - and life will always be imperfect - someone in government is going to say, "We've gotta do something about this!" It is a primal urge of government agencies to grow, never to shrink. No one in government makes his career by streamlining and downsizing; mission creep is what's incentivized.
And when something is viewed as the government's responsibility, people are less likely to take the initiative to do it on their own. So the idea that government has to just keep on doing things it can't even afford to do until society spontaneously decides to pick up the slack doesn't fly because that simply isn't going to happen.
