Government’s New Minimalist Mission

IBDeditorials.com has a great article entitled, Government’s New Minimalist Mission: ‘Just Keep Us Safe And Leave Us Alone’, that discusses the need for small government. The funny thing is that the Left preaches the need for government help/intervention in everything. Yet, when showcasing a successful individual, rarely is government help mentioned as the reason for the success. It is always how the individual succeeded in a world stacked against him or her.

The quote below is only a snippet of the entire article. The bolding is mine.

The following set of minimalist guidelines may be useful.
1. The need for government in a society varies inversely to the sophistication and affluence of its people. Despite government’s recent depredations, America is for the most part still an educated, highly civilized and affluent society. At present, therefore, it needs little governance. If these qualities decline among the population (because of immigration or otherwise), more governance will be needed.
2. Government is a high-cost way of doing anything. The reason is it finances itself with taxes, which do more harm to the private economy than they yield in revenues for the government to spend. This damage occurs because taxes function like a pay cut, reducing the reward to work and investment and curtailing the supply of both.
3. The less government does, the better off we are. Because the tax revenues the government has available are always less than the cost of acquiring them, government should spend its resources solely on high-value projects that only it can perform. National defense is the best example.
4. Government cannot spend its way out of the economic hole dug by taxes. When government expands beyond its limited areas of competence and efficiency, the public benefit per dollar of additional spending drops and the marginal cost of more taxes to pay for bigger government rises.
5. Since we need so little and the cost is so high, why do we have so much government? Washington tells voters that a dollar of taxes costs only a dollar (even though experts agree that the cost is at least $2. It then insists that each dollar of spending produces much more than a dollar of public benefit (though the government’s own data show that the benefit is often less than a dollar). Washington also tells voters that the burden of taxes is borne mostly by the rich (though the damage done by taxes harms everyone, especially wage earners).
6. How to make and keep government small? There are three key steps: (a) tell the voters the truth about the high cost of taxes weighed against the often low benefit of spending; (b) force Congress to adhere to a cost-benefit budget procedure, conducted in the open with full public notice and voter participation; and (c) give everyone a “tax cut dividend” when spending reduction targets are met — and send them a bill for additional taxes when spending goes up. Government will shrink, the economy will grow and, with a large base of prosperity, America will always have plenty of money with which to meet any crisis.

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