An efficient government is a small government

There’s a great article in the National Review by Veronique De Rugy that perfectly explains why a small government is the most effective and the only kind that can truly restore the country back to what was originally promised in the founding documents.

It begins reviewing a Washington Post article written by a self-proclaimed progressive, Larry Summers, who has recently found himself empathizing with the two-thirds of American citizens who distrust their government. It came to mind as he recently waited in traffic on a bridge that, he said, could never seem to be “competently” repaired. If government can’t complete such a small task, Summers pondered, how can it be trusted to “fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges” and so on.

Welcome to your first taste of liberty, Mr. Summers.

But then it’s not really about developing a trust in the government; that’s an oxymoron. If the government could prove itself in the small things, it doesn’t therefore mean it can be trusted to do the bigger things. The right solution is never placing trust in government in the first place, as De Rugy wisely notes:

When you find out that the government spends $1 million to study monkeys running in hamster balls on a treadmill or $706,800 to conduct a so-called “shrimp fight club,” you have good reasons to doubt that it will be able to pull off a federal health-care exchange. But then again, there are also plenty of major government failures and failed promises to convince us to never trust government and politicians ever again (“if you like your plan, you can keep it,” Operation Fast and Furious, the war in Iraq, the failure of the war on drugs, Benghazi, the Veteran Affairs scandal, the worst recovery since World War II, just to name a few).

And just as quickly as Summers finds himself empathizing with those of us who want a smaller government, his idealism gets in the way, leading him to believe that a government held accountable is the path to trust and efficiency. That’s a very naive view. Here are some questions De Rugy has for anyone on a quest for accountability with a federal government that sneezes and spends $4 trillion per year:

How do we monitor every government program out there and complain about what’s not working? By writing letters to your representative? How many regular people without deep pockets and a promise to finance a future campaign does it take to catch the attention of one’s representative? Do we hold them accountable by voting our representatives out of office if they don’t do anything about a given problem?

By birthright, politicians survive on self-interest. Remember “Congressman X” admitting that his only goal is reelection? The incentive for politicians to get anything done isn’t how it affects the American people, but how it secures their own jobs, and that means keeping allies happy, not necessarily the public. (They can be lied to.)

The old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions plays well here. Big government programs may be launched by the well-intended, but it has led us into a large, gaping, bottomless pit that at this rate of free fall, will be impossible to escape. The only way out, as De Rugy so eloquently explains, is not through accountability but by shrinking “the size and scope of government to limit the damages it can do.”