Comments on: What is Big Government?

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:51:00 +0000

Please. We all know the answer is “the proper way to measure big government is to add up the cost of all the things I don’t like.”

By: McClain

McClain — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:13:00 +0000

Spy cams and secret police aren’t free.
So the intrusiveness of the state is tied to its finances.
But making the hanged man pay for the rope is merely adding insult to injury.
I’m not so worried about the government getting a good deal on its spy cams.
I just don’t want any *!@?#@$%!&* government spy cams in my house, knowh’I'msain?

By: jack

jack — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 21:41:00 +0000

A strawman argument. Big government really has nothing to do with how much money it collects/spends. Big governemnt is a government that interferes in it’s citizens business. I believe that 99% of the laws we have on the books today are laws that are meant to undo/redo the harm caused by previous attempts at regulating business. They all fail for obvious reasons. But the governemnt gets “bigger”, I.E., more invasive. You could just as easily have a government that collects hardly anything in taxes but regulates every second of a person’s day. To me, that government is much bigger than one that takes a lot in taxes. Look at the Communist model. It wasn’t so much the fact that they “owned” all the people and dollars in the economy. It was more the fact that they constantly spied on and regulated their citizens that made the government “big”. And hated.

By: loyopp

loyopp — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 19:28:00 +0000

Sure, I know one of the federal agencies well from the inside, which shall remain nameless. The number of attorneys on staff writing regulations has changed very little in the last 20 years. However, as of either the second Reagan or Bush the Elder’s administration (perhaps someone can correct me), the agency (and all agencies) was required to complete a study of economic costs and benefits for each regulation. Adding that extra cost slowed the pace of production of new regulations notably. Notice the size of the staff is constant, so the cost of the agency is more or less unchanged, but the amount of regulation (the “size” in that sense) varies. All I’m saying is even when you control for the size of the budget, there will still be variation in the intrusiveness of government. The attitude toward enforcement of regulations varies as well.

On a different note, I notice I read the original post incorrectly. I thought we were talking about a government that collects everyone’s income, and gives 98% of that aggregate income back in equal shares to everyone. I see now that Will Wilkinson meant you get 98% of your *own* income back. In the former case, nobody works (as I mentioned in an earlier comment), in the latter case, as gerry g pointed out, everyone works, though they work a bit less than in the absence of the 2% tax.

By: Bernard

Bernard — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 16:48:00 +0000

loy, could I have an example?

On my point, I think a good example would be in policing. Policing a law which is generally accepted (and therefore, I’m going to say, less intrusive) is much less costly than policing one which is controversial (prohibition being the obvious example). The more individuals feel that breaking the law is a matter of personal liberty the harder it needs to be enforced to make it effective, and therefore the more costly.

I can’t immediately think of an example of a regulation which would be seriously illibertarian but not cost very much to enforce.

By: loyopp

loyopp — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 14:38:00 +0000

Bernard,
Granted, they likely are correlated, but I suspect the correlation is a weak one. Spending on the bureaucracy doesn’t vary a whole lot as administrations come and go. There is a *lot* of inertia in the size of the staff. However, the rate at which the bureaucracy produces regulations varies a great deal. This I’ve seen first hand from the inside — anecdotal evidence, but evidence nonetheless. It’s an empirical question that would be interesting to pursue.

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 04:00:00 +0000

Oddly enough, I think my intuition says that the government in this example is big – perhaps even bigger than the current US government. It has power to tax at arbitrary rates, and fully 50% of its effective spending is transaction costs.

By: gerry g

gerry g — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 20:38:00 +0000

Andrew Roth:
Actually you would not get the Laffer curve effect in this example. Since I know I will end up with 98% of what I earn, I have a huge incentive to work. In a way, this may help highlight just how weird the example is. But there may be a useful practical angle. Suppose I allowed for charitable donations to not just be tax deductions, but also REPLACE my taxes. That way, when I work overtime I can say I am actually working for my favorite charity. In that setting you would again get a much weaker disincentive effect from taxation. Of course, the reason is that I have reclaimed a big measure of control over my earnings (I can’t consume them, but can direct them to my favored charity, which is a great deal more than I can say for tax dollars).

By: Bernard

Bernard — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 10:15:00 +0000

That was phrased poorly. What I meant to say was that although measuring government spending does not perfectly capture intrusiveness, a government which is more intrusive will necessarily spend more because the less popular a regulation the harder and costlier it is to enforce. Because the negative effect of intrusive regulation is harder to measure measuring size by reference to spending is a decent approximation.

By: Bernard

Bernard — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 10:08:00 +0000

loyopp,

agree’d that intrusive regulations are a part of the size of government. However, any effective regulation relies on spending to enforce it, whether through a new oversight body or the expanding of powers for existing ones. Therefore while size is not a definitive indication of intrusiveness there is a rough correlation between the two.