"Small Government" is No Paradise for the Masses

It's the buzz word right now: "small government", or sometimes, "simple government". The conservative ideologues and demagogues talk about such a concept in two ways: "it's what the Founding Fathers really wanted", or they represent it as a "new" or "novel" idea. They paint what they believe to be an idyllic picture of the "liberty" to "fend for oneself" and the "liberty" not to be "interfered with". Such a form of government has in fact been the norm for most of human history. Small government in the Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Worlds was all about being for and by a small and select group of aristocrats, plutocrats and war-makers and their narrow concerns, aims and interests. The rest of the population was left to the whim and mercy of the dominant members of their society. This arrangement came under various names through history, all amounting to the same thing: the feudal state, patrician republic, the despotic state, monarchy, oligarchy, the imperial state -- all of them spelled massive social injustice for the masses. Small government has never been about protecting the vulnerable. It has always been about facilitating the will of the powerful. History tells no other tale. The truth is quite the opposite of the currently-bruited revisionist-history myth of the libertarians: the small concept of government is exactly what our Founding Fathers were trying to liberate themselves from! Remember, the American colonists had no voice in the Imperial British Government, and the taxes they paid to that Imperial Government did not go toward improvements in their colonial living conditions. The Founding Fathers set up a democratic republic, empowered to make broad improvements for the country and to provide broad protections and privileges for the whole of its citizenry. It was the ultimate rejection of small government. It was government for everybody, and to effectively do this, it must be a large form of government. Otherwise, people with less financial clout will inevitably fall through the cracks. It all boils down to the perennial problem of human nature: it has its dark and selfish side. That is why (large) government was created in the first place: to effectively hold those dark and selfish tendencies in check.