The Dangers of Naïve Faith in Big Government

[EasyAce]

Voters are increasingly placing their trust in government to solve their problems, despite its endless record of incompetence
By Michael D. Tanner
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/naive-faith-in-big-government-dangerous-growing/

Last week the New York Times reported that Puerto Rican authorities had discovered at least ten trailers full of food, medicine, and baby supplies that were left to rot as a result of government ineptitude in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. At this point, news stories about such incompetence are so commonplace that the Times’s scoop barely elicited a yawn.

Yet it does — or should — raise a question. Given the ongoing evidence of government’s inability to carry out even its most basic tasks, why do so many Americans want to expand its control over our lives?

The democratic socialists who are all the rage in American politics at the moment have long since run out of foreign examples of socialist nirvana to point to. Venezuela is busy starving its children, while the Danish prime minister is scolding American liberals that “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Nor does the record of government in this country provide much more on which to hang faith in big government. Yet that doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Indeed, every demonstrated government failure seems to lead inevitably to calls for . . . more government . . .

. . . A naïve faith in big government isn’t strictly a phenomenon of the Left, of course — especially in the age of Trump. Conservatives who long decried government as unable to manage a two-car funeral suddenly argue that it should determine everything from whom we trade with to what parental-leave policies our employers institute. And when it comes to businesses hiring the best foreign talent, Trump-era conservatives increasingly embrace quotas and restrictions more akin to Soviet-style central planning than to the free-market economics that made this country prosperous . . .

. . . Samuel Johnson once facetiously described second marriages as “the triumph of hope over experience.” Given the record of government failure, calls for a bigger more intrusive government might be described as the triumph of hope over common sense.

[Bigun]

I'm in favor of government but it needs to be one that fits INSIDE the Constitution.

[EasyAce]

I'm in favor of government but it needs to be one that fits INSIDE the Constitution.

For an extremely long time, government has become the nation's greatest public nuisance and largest organised crime family.

[Bigun]

For an extremely long time, government has become the nation's greatest public nuisance and largest organised crime family.

Well since about 1860 anyway.

[INVAR]

Well, from what I read from "Conservatives" today - big government is perfectly fine and good when expanded if it is managed by Republicans and Trump.