Before you conservatives attack, let's see why we have and what's wrong with big government.
In today's complex society, many forces are at work in making government bigger and bigger. But I believe the three biggest factors are:
1. U.S. is a World Super-power - As a super-power, U.S. has a presence in all countries around the world. We claim to not being the world's policeman, but we are. This is one reason why we are constantly at war and currently we are fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also why we have the biggest defense budget in history. We spend more on the military than do all other countries on the face of the earth combined. And we have around 700 bases around the globe.
2. Big Corporations have Mega-power - Small business corporations, because of their limited size, are competitive and thus the backbone of our capitalistic system. But once they get big, huge, monstrous they become anti-competitive, economically powerful, politically powerful. Bankers run their firms for the benefit of bankers and not to help startups, their true purpose; in the process they ruin the economy for the rest of us. The military-industrial complex agitates for war, which kills many of us and wastes the dollars we pay in taxes. Multinational corporations act as governments, often in opposition to our government's foreign policy. Monopolies and even oligopolies of 2 or 3 big corporations kill competition by controling their markets and by preventing competitors from entering their industry.
3. Ordinary Citizens have Limited Power - Yes, Americans believe in the power of the individual. But in the extremely diverse society we live in, a tiny few rich and elite people have orders of magnitude more power than the average guy. And the power of Big Business is an order of magnitude above that. Consumers need protection from economic swindles such as subprime loans, and shoddy and unhealthy merchandise. Employees need protection from unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Members of minority groups need protection of their civil rights.
Just trying to maintain our world super-power status is enough to make our government big. Add to that the fact that without government regulation, huge corporations could drown out the voice of ordinary people; corporations may become powerful enough to effectively displace the American government.
This is why today we need big government. However, big government does lead to big corruption. There's big corruption because the government handles big money, money for maintaining our super-power status, money for helping business develop and grow, money to help ordinary citizens cope.
Money is the great seducer. Money is the great corrupter of election campaigns. It's almost impossible to win an election without money. Very often, the candidate with the most money wins. This is a made-to-order environment for a billionaire to get himself or herself elected by spending a few of his or her own millions.
Money buys legislators. If you have contributed money to his campaign you now have "access," something ordinary people don't have. You can increase your "access" by paying lobbyists to "explain" to legislators how to vote for important legislation.
One way to reduce corruption in government is to reduce government size: limited government. Not the limited government endorsed by conservatives - laissez faire and deregulation - that would make society as a whole more corrupt. NO, we need regulations to subdue the worst inclinations of the powerful and enhance the lives of the powerless.
So how would liberals achieve a limited government that is good for all the people? We need to concentrate on 3 tasks:
1. Reduce America's World Footprint - I believe that trying to be everything to every nation on earth is the single most important reason that our government is too big. We can reduce our defense budget by a factor of 2 or 3 and still be the most powerful nation on earth. We can reduce the number of bases by a factor of 10 and probably make our armed forces more efficient as a result. We can stop the wars and save lives and money. We can stop buying expensive and obsolete arms. Of course, we must modify our foreign policy to favor diplomacy and cooperation among nations.
2. Reduce Power of Corporations - Every time corporations are allowed to do as they please, they produce disasters. An obvious example is how the financial industry brought about the current deep recession. Instead of more regulation (that has passed), it would have been better to reduce the power of financial corporations. One way to do it is to break up the banks so they are NEVER too-big-to-fail. To make sure that no corporation becomes extraordinarily powerful, we could use taxes: the bigger a corporation gets the higher the taxes it must pay. Of course, we need to put more teeth into anti-trust, as well. The less power corporations have the fewer the needed regulations.
3. Reduce Influence of Money in Campaigns - The reason corporations and rich individuals have so much political power in the first place is that they have lots of money. The Supreme Court, in the Citizens United opinion said that corporations can spend freely in campaigns, giving Big Business the greatest voice of all and the most power. We need to reform political campaigns, by softening the impact of the Citizens United decision through legislation or amendment, and by offering candidates free media for discussions of their positions. Another way would be for a non-profit organization to encourage, organize and present full fledged candidate debates. Stopping politicians from becoming lobbyists and lobbysists from becoming politicians would help too.
Our whole philosophical approach to government needs to change. Andrew J. Bacevich shows in The End of (Military) History how we must rethink international relations. He demonstrates that war has become useless in achieving any goal. In previous centuries wars produced conquests. Recent wars - Israeli-Palestinian wars as well as Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts - are producing nothing but misery for everyone; there aren't and can't be any winners.
This shows, I believe, that the tremendous motivating force of the past - competition, the primary force behind war - is increasingly ineffective in solving international problems. A big dose of cooperation must be injected to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace, to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb and to work with China, India, Brazil, Europe and other countries to make the world economy healthy and to make the world itself fit for human habitation. Doing this would make our government a great deal smaller.
At home, smaller businesses would be more competitive. Paradoxically, this increased business competitiveness would act to make business executives more cooperative towards their workers and their consumers, thus helping the little guy.
The conservative call for limited government is based on rugged indvidualism and excessive competition. The liberal approach to limited government is based on the cooperative idea that we should all work together for the common good. A liberal limited government would be less corrupt, achieve better capitalism, be more democratic and produce happer citizens.
