Big Government -- STOP!

Editorial - January 21st, 2010 - The Economist

America’s most vibrant political force at the moment is the anti-tax tea-party movement. Even in leftish Massachusetts people are worried that Mr Obama’s spending splurge, notably his still-unpassed health-care bill, will send the deficit soaring. In Britain, where elections are usually spending competitions, the contest this year will be fought about where to cut. Even in regions as historically statist as Scandinavia and southern Europe debates are beginning to emerge about the size and effectiveness of government.

There are good reasons, as well as bad ones, why the state is growing; but the trend must be reversed. Doing so will prove exceedingly hard—not least because the bigger and more powerful the state gets, the more it tends to grow. But electorates, as in Massachusetts, eventually revolt; and such expressions of voters’ fury are likely to shape politics in the years to come.

This is an interesting hypothesis, that "big government is about to be reduced." Certainly there are large segments of the population who are furious about the stifling society that big government creates. Freedom is not dead yet... still the portion of society that values freedom more than a government handout is growing smaller.

There is also a large segment of society that understands the economic disaster that socialist programs create, including sustained high unemployment and emasculation of the work ethic. Both weaken a nation. The problem is the segment that understands this is usually much smaller than the segment that votes for a free ride.

With the admiration for the evil of democracy that has been fostered by otherwise intelligent people, the desire for free programs from government, and the growing lack of insistence on freedom, the hypothesis to resist the usual course of democracy's corruption into tyranny looks pretty shaky to me. Yet I cannot deny that the Miracle in Massachusetts occurred.

I think this November's election day is going to be a truly interesting event in the world's history. I believe no matter what the result will be better than I would have hoped last year. The question is whether all of the conflicting forces now embroiling our nation will truly provide momentum to reduce government or whether the forces merely slow the race to tyranny.