In the U.S. Constitution, the nation’s founders originally conceived of a very
limited federal government that protected, rather than usurped, the liberty
of its people (not just its citizens), and also defended those same people,
their territory, and way of life from foreign threats. The massive federal government
today regularly infringes on people’s rights in everything from privacy to the
taking of private property through confiscation and excessive taxation. Also,
the US government is concerned with maintaining its informal overseas empire,
which is counterproductive to the safety of its people at home and around the
world. In short, the federal government’s growth is out of control and on autopilot,
which should concern liberals, conservatives, moderates, greens, and libertarians
alike.
The real problem with government is its incentive structure. That is, when
spending other people’s money, the spenders — government officials, most of them
unelected — have little incentive to be judicious and may spend the money according
to the interests of their own bureaucracies instead of the taxpayer. Thus, many
government decisions, although passing the Madison Avenue test for convincing
the public, turn out to be bad ideas. That is not to say that corporations,
billionaires, and private persons of lesser means do not make bad decisions,
but they have at least some incentive to make better ones because the money
they waste will be their own.
Government politicians and bureaucrats seem to be especially unconstrained
to make good decisions in foreign and defense policy, because the public has
a greater familiarity with things that affect them on a day-to-day basis — such
as schools, roads, and the environment — than they do with faraway lands and
exotic military hardware. Thus, the American people have repeatedly accepted
military disasters abroad in the foreign empire, only complaining when the number
of American body bags becomes great in a seeming endless quagmire — for example,
in the US occupation of Iraq after George W. Bush’s foolish and needless invasion
of that country. Even then, opposition to such imperial adventures is now muted
because American wars are always “over there” in some faraway country
and because no Vietnam-era draft exists to shanghai middle class kids — who
want to be doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. — into fighting in some distant
hellhole.