There are two metrics from which we can assess government – quality and quantity. There’s a lot of dispute about what the quantity of government should be. A lot of the difference in that dispute comes from differences in how they think about quality of government.
Some people assess an optimal view of government’s quality, and then conclude that we need a higher quantity in order to reach that quality. If government can do better, then it should do more. If government can feed the poor, then we need government to spend more on welfare.
The president said something like that. He said something like, “it isn’t a matter of bigger or smaller government. It is a matter of is government working.” Some people think about what a working government would look like, and that determines that we need more government to get there.
That seems reasonable. But if government isn’t working – if government does not and will never reach that optimal version of the one in your head, doesn’t that imply that we should have less government?
Other people assess a realistic view of government, how often it fails to reach that optimum, and then determine how much government we should have from there. If government can do better, that doesn’t mean that it will if you let it do more. Even if government can feed the poor, maybe it still shouldn’t spend more on welfare because it realistically won’t feed the poor, or it will but also do proportional harm.
One illustration of this is the people who want to replace the welfare system of the United States with that of Sweden. Suppose that they’re right, and the Swedish system leads to better consequences than what we have. It’s natural to think that this implies this person wants a larger welfare system for the United States, but it doesn’t. Yes the Swedish system if larger, but it is one of many large welfare systems, many of which lead to terrible consequences. If government gets a larger welfare system, it might look like Sweden's, but it probably won’t, and you’d have to assess something typical or realistic in order to justify a larger welfare system. We can’t take the best government can do from each country, and if our government hasn’t done that conclude that it should do more.
I think that there are a lot of optimal policies that government could do to improve outcomes. The best government would be large. But I also don’t have very high expectations for the quality of government if government does more. Government isn’t going to be perfect, so given these imperfections, it shouldn’t be large.
A big part of why I don’t think government will realistically improve outcomes is that my ideal policies are not popular, and the popular policy debates are totally inane. It isn’t just the elitist in me speaking, it has been shown again and again that voters fail a simple survey of factual questions about government and policy, why should I expect their opinions to be any better? And if government at best follows the democratic will, then isn’t government at best will follow an inane public policy?
