Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

The public sentiment that the government is going too much and also too little is not self contradictory. An effective, market based democracy depends on people being able to make informed choices well. Government does too little when it fails to ensure the health of markets. It does too much when it tries to replace the market as the decision making mechanism rather than restoring its healthy functionality.

Naftali Bendavid write that “voters [are]simultaneously recoiling at laissez-faire policies and a big-government approach [and] neither party in Washington seems capable of corralling an angry public.” (”Rage at Government for Doing Too Much and Not Enough“, Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2009).

In other words, government is doing to much and it is doing too little.  How can that be?

Whether they can express it or not as elegantly as Frederick Hayek or Milton Friedman, most people understand that government is too removed from the facts and moves to slow to respond effectively to changing circumstances, so leave decision making to individuals, and when there are collective concerns that they cannot address alone, make choices as local as possible–town before county, county before state, state before nation.

For this to happen, people and small groups need reliable information and the right to make reasoned choice.

It is in the failure of both left and right to understand this that leads to the complaint that the government does to much and it also does too little.

Too little when, as in the Bush years, the government neglected its stewardship of market health: It let transparency and accountability fail by the wayside so a select few could act to personal benefit at the expense of the public.  Too much when, as in the Obama administration, the government tries to dictate who can do what and when rather than re-establishing itself as managing the health of the system within the rest of us make informed choice.

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