What is small government?
I have been trying to understand this for a number of years. I know what politicians would like us to think that it means - lower taxes, less bureaucracy - but is that really what they are trying to do?
I guess in a libertarian kind of way, small government would mean every man (and women and child) for themselves. No social programs. No common interests. No public goods.
No social contract whatsoever.
Some would call this anarchy, but the difference is that this would be constructive and not destructive. The market would provide the rules and as long as the market was satisfied, anything would be permissible.
Need a bridge over a river? Find the funding, build it yourself and then charge people to use it. You could then use the money that you make to pay back your creditors with a profit for yourself.
If you charge too much to use your bridge, then someone else will come along and build an alternative, charge less and they will take all of your traffic.
Except of course that is not how things really work. Rather the bridge owners would collude to charge exactly the same price so that people wanting to use the bridge would have no real choice. And they would use their clout in the community to prevent anyone else from building more bridges.
How? Well, they would get together like-minded individuals who have their own financial interests to protect and organize into something that could run the place - set up rules of governance that would prevent others from honing in on their business.
Government would be born again.
In other words, small government leading to no government ultimately leads back to government by people with money. Some would argue this is what we already have.
Which leads me back to the question of what is small government? Why is this deemed to be a good thing?
This came up the other day in a conversation.
The contention was that small government would free the market up to make decisions. It would free the market to operate unfettered.
I don't see this though. The recent decision, for example, of the provincial government or B.C. Hydro to capitulate and pay back $750 million dollars to California is an example.
This is a very old case but essentially in the late 1990s there was a deficit of electricity on the market and California's demand could not be met within its own borders. It needed to buy power and went to the open market. Those with electricity to sell, such as Powerex - the sales branch of B.C. Hydro - charged what they could get. Isn't that how the market is supposed to work?
But here we have one of the largest and most populated states in a country that prides itself on capitalism and the free market suing us because the market worked the way that it is supposed to. A commodity in short supply is worth more than a commodity in abundance. We are just not supposed to expect to get paid more.
In any case, the Senate scandal and the prorogation of parliament make me wonder where our prime minister sits on the whole question of small government.
He has spoken about it many times over the years.
"But I'm very libertarian in the sense that I believe in small government and, as a general rule, I don't believe in imposing values upon people" he said in 2004.
"We must aim to make [Canada] a lower tax jurisdiction than the United States" is from the same year.
In 2005, he said "I believe that all taxes are bad" and in the 2006 leaders' debate he described Canada as a "vast and empty country."
Presumably, the follow up is we should be wide open to allowing the free market to come in and exploit our resources paying little or no taxes. We need to have small government - read: no social programs - so that we don't need those tax dollars.
Let the market rule.
In the context of the Senate scandal and, for that matter, many of the issues that have arisen with the Harper government, is he just trying to make it seem like government is costly, corrupt and over-blown?
Is he trying to get out of running the country in the same way that a 13 year old would try to get out of doing the dishes - by doing such a bad job that you finally come in and say "enough already!"
Is he proroguing Parliament to show that it isn't working?
Is he spending outrageous sums of money on a two day G20 meeting to show just how bad things are?
Personally, I think that a case could be made for a smaller, more efficient government but mine wouldn't include Harper.
