Comment by dxuh
2 days ago
I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
No but lots of republicans vote for them actually hoping for smaller less interventionary government, believe it or not. The voters that give them power do not view it as that euphemism.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
Most of these republicans/libertarians only want the government to leave them alone. They don't care when a company they aren't affiliated with is regulated. You can see Marc Andreesen celebrating the government's decision on Anthropic. Similarly, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, libertarians such as David Sacks were loudly calling for government bailouts. It's just hypocrisy all the way up.
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That's exactly right. The US Government is ruthlessly efficient - yeah, people don't want to hear that. Sure, there are Pentagon-related boondoggles, but that's different.
Try working in a government office - you will be lucky to get a water cooler - BYOW.
"Small government" means "fuck you, I got mine, now let's gut the IRS so I can do some white collar crime".
I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.
Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.
The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
There's vastly more to politics than that. There's even more to "small" vs "big" government than that, or to who really promises and delivers what. This convenient reduction to handy little words obscures all that, to the point where it stops mapping to reality in a meaningful way. It's a fictional abstraction.
If anything, your question reduces to making one party sound incompetent or deceitful, I don't know if that's intended. (And considering that aspect of the party is another fun can full of real-life worms.)
> one party sound incompetent or deceitful
Based on the parent comment, I think it's more "one party sound incompetent and the other deceitful". There was a senator who used to say that American politics was a contest between the stupid party and the evil party.
> There's vastly more to politics than that.
I thought so in my teens. But now I know that I was naive. How can you be sure that you're not?
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Looks like those in favor of small government should not vote - to apply evolutionary pressure instead of rewarding unacceptable behavior
The second biggest problem with this comment is that the conclusion we must take from it if we buy into your statement is that we shouldn’t bother voting.
We would not have a costly war in Iran, blockaded Strait of Hormuz, $6-7/gallon gas, or blanket import tariffs hiking up the prices of consumer staple goods if we voted for the “party that promises bigger government and does deliver.”
I would submit the idea that the latter party is consistently misrepresented and has been the only one that has delivered smaller budget deficits anytime recently.
See also: Tax Cut and Jobs Act, the Kansas Experiment.
The truth of the matter is, our elites are undertaxed at historic levels. At no point in our lifetime have the wealthy been taxed at a lower rate than they are today. There isn’t actually anything wrong with government spending outside of the endless/aimless wars (started by…). It’s the revenue side that deserves scrutiny.
Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).
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US still has the second amendment and the most guns per person of any country in the world (more than 10x the average), yet I don't see anybody "fight back against the benefactors"
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The US has plenty of guns. The idea that there aren't sufficient guns for some kind of armed resistance is absurd. The issue is cultural - we'd apparently rather fire them off in schools and malls and movie theaters.
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> D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
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> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
Right, but both of those examples are terrible ideas on their face.
On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.
And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.
As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.
Not that I disagree, but it should be asked: Retribution for what? The answers are, generally:
>COVID restrictions
>The state of the economy
>The state of culture, broadly-speaking
>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)
I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)
> Americans voted for Trump hoping
There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.
From an EU perspective it can look complicated. But when you look at the data, the American electorate is relatively simple-minded. For example: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...
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>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
That is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.
despite not doing what they claim to do, this is still what they always claim to do.
Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.
Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
> Those days are long gone. > Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"
I know it's not what you mean, but Lincoln dramatically shrank the size of the Confederate government.
Trump is much more of a statist than previous Republican presidents (and arguably Democratic ones as well).
“Advertising” vs “doing”
"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.
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