RULE #2: SJWs always double down. You're literally saying that they oppose functional government because they support functional government.
There's mountains of data and historical evidence out there that bigger governments waste more. There's also the reality of human nature that more power means more corruption. It's also just a common sense thing. I mean, look at our government spending, wasteful programs, and $160,000,000,000,000 in debt. Even if it were blind faith, that doesn't translate into a desire for functional government. That's just irrational garbage. "They want dysfunctional government because they want more functional government". That's double-think right there, dude.
Research Shows that Small Government Is Efficient Government
Did FDR End the Great Depression?
Ok, so I’ve read the report on which that Cato piece was based:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp242.pdf
And it’s interesting. I’m gonna shamelessly commit an ad hominem and dismiss that PragerU video out of hand because I’ve had such bad experiences with them in the past that I don’t think they’re worth my time, except for the time required to dump on them whenever the opportunity arises.
But the paper is interesting and I’ll concede that, after reading it, I’m less confident in my prior attitude that right wing anti-government boilerplate is completely unfounded. That said, I can see a couple possible holes in their case.
First, the paper is just kinda old. Their data is from 2000, which is right at the peak (or beginning of the crash) of the dotcom bubble, before 9/11, before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and way before the 2008 crash. The US came out pretty good on most of their metrics, but those events all have the potential to really skew things. They may not make any difference at all, but either way, I’d be interested to see an updated study.
Second, government size correlated to efficiency but not to performance. Efficiency is a good thing, but it’s not everything. In many things in life, there’s a law of diminishing returns, where the marginal improvement gained by each additional expenditure is smaller than the last. Sometimes, achieving peak performance requires spending gobs of money. Moneyball doesn’t win in the playoffs. And while my Mazda is orders of magnitude more economically efficient than an F1 car, I’m not winning the Monaco Grand Prix.
Third, there are ways to skew these numbers without making any real world difference. If, for example, the US decided to nationalize our entire health care and health insurance industries, but otherwise maintain the status quo, then we’d tank our efficiency numbers because our ratio of spending to GDP would skyrocket without any effect on people’s real world experience. That may be an argument for offloading health care to the private sector, but it would also be possible in this situation for the government to outperform the private sector while still showing worse efficiency than before. In that case, we would be better off nationalizing everything, while these metrics would suggest the opposite. IOW, this only compares to efficiencies across governments, not efficiencies across the combination of government and private sector.
Fourth, I’m skeptical that the weighting is optimal. The US performs terribly on performance metrics for healthcare (last place) and income inequality (next to last), which are hugely important to a ton of people, but that gets weighted about the same as red tape, which... eh?
So, it’s interesting, but its far from airtight and it certainly doesn’t provide a solid basis for the often-dogmatic assertion that we must always shrink government more.
