WHAT EXACTLY DOES “LESS GOVERNMENT” MEAN AND WHO EXACTLY DOES “LESS GOVERNMENT” HELP?

Our government has increased for over 100 years because our population has increased for over 100 years.  And because government exists to represents the common good of ALL of us, it got bigger to do its job.

So what exactly does someone mean when they say less government is better when there are more of us to represent?

The answer may be that representing the common good seems to have changed to mean “get government out of the way to let businesses grow.”  The traditional value and meaning of the “common good” has been replaced by a sound bite and code for the following economic strategy:

Government stays out of the way of business expansionism.  Business and industry gets bigger because reduced regulatory laws eliminate competition from innovative and energetic, yet capital poor, smaller business owners.  Established Labor laws are weakened to increase “productivity and investment profit margins”.  Workers become marginalized in favor of workplace “efficiencies”.  Staff salaries shrink to reward hard-to-find good executive management.  Wealth concentrates in fewer hands.  The average employee, in turn, has less buying power.  However, since consumer spending drives 70 percent of our economy, sales slump and the economy stagnates.

Who made the assumption—and why does the middle class that are the most negatively affected—so easily believe that after 200 years, government is now the enemy of business and progress?  In fact, products of government create the environment for business to grow.

An educated workforce takes significant government investment in schools.  Investment in roads, rails, ports, communications and other transportation infrastructure get business goods, services and people from the factory to markets and homes.  If government gets out of the way and lets these pieces of the economy crumble, no single business or business group ever has, or ever will step up, to rebuild them because they say it is government’s job.

State and national economic development plans connect all size firms to government financial capital incentives and long-term business venture security.  Public investment in research universities spurs innovation for new products and business processes.

Conservatives don’t want smaller government.  They just want a smaller part of government services now going to the common good to instead, be controlled by fewer wealthier hands.  It is hard to understand how that makes less government better for the majority of us.