I recently saw mention of the notion that Bernie Sanders’ supporters believe that cronyism (a core aspect of of our current government) can be remedied by the vigorous application of socialism. Both involve Big Government, i.e. substantial government involvement in our personal and economic lives, and both involve concentrating power over matters economic in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, yet this belief suggests that the believers see a difference between socialist big government and cronyist big government.
What real difference is there? What does it matter the form in which government force imposes itself on us? After all, history makes it quite clear that Big Government is counterproductive to human success, and that the freest societies have been the most successful and most beneficial to their people. Big Government has resulted in human misery no matter its form. Kingdoms, theocracies, dictatorships, socialism, fascism, communism – none of these really stands apart from the others in the dispensation of misery, does it? The constancy of human nature makes this so. No matter how much indoctrination takes place, no matter how enlightened or good or benevolent one particular leader might be, the basic wiring inside our skulls, itself the product of tens or hundreds of millennia of evolution, brings us to the same outcome. When people have power and dominion over other people, people suffer. Power corrupts, and misery ensues.
Political commentary often identifies people by their position on a left-right axis. Left is often used to mean liberal and right is often used to mean conservative, and usually the left is presumed to believe in greater government control and involvement in people’s lives. However, because the right is also willing to use government force to impose certain strictures or to strive for certain outcomes and because the left wants government less involved in some matters (or at least it used to), this one-dimensional axis has been deemed inadequate.
To fill that inadequacy, numerous forms of two-dimensional charting have been developed. Among the libertarian crowd, the most famous is the Nolan Chart, which plots personal/cultural and economic matters and government control thereof on two axes. This and its ilk do a far better job of placing an individual’s collected beliefs onto a particular point than the left-right axis does. But, even here, it does boil down to government involvement. One’s personal beliefs have no bearing on the world if they are purely personal, individual and internalized, and not to be imposed on others.
Since two dimensional graphs are a bit dry and cumbersome, especially in casual political conversation, I’d like to propose a return to a simple left-right axis. But, instead of assigning the left to liberalism, wherein lies the antipode of social-conservative issues and values, and the right to conservatism, wherein lies substantial statist thought with regard to those social conservative values (and to many matters military), I’ll assign the left to Big Government and the right to Small Government. And, since Big Government has been a consistent detriment to human happiness and success throughout history, I’ll conflate Big Government with Evil and Small Government with Good.
I am among those who lament the Twitter culture, the reduction of oftentimes complex issues and discussions to 140 character quips and sound-bite-worthy quotes. Long-format discourse, nuanced analysis and depth of thought are dying forms, much to the detriment of society and human advancement. Sometimes, however, brevity is truly best, and when it comes to political spectra, eschewing complexity in favor of simplicity distills the nature of the problem down to its core. Good vs Evil, Small Government vs Big Government, Right vs Left.
Or, in the words of Grumpy cat, Should the government… No.
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