- Forcing Industry to Play Ball - The greater percentage of the the economy that federal spending becomes, the more industries will be reliant on government spending or government contracts. If you don't play ball with the federal government, or you do something the federal government doesn't like, the federal government can punish a given company by withholding funds or bringing audits. This is a form of soft tyranny that is already becoming a tool used by bureaucrats in D.C. to get their way. I expect this to get worse as federal spending rises.
- Inefficiencies - A wise man (my Father) once stated, "The government does somethings well, but it does nothing efficiently. There are some tasks that are best suited to be done by the federal government and they should be. But we should only use the federal government as a policy tool only when necessary as having government involvement in a solution tends to mean that solution will be very expensive.
- Bad Employee - The federal government's involvement in the daily political and economic lives of American's has increased dramatically over time. I would argue that many things the federal government does it does poorly. Giving the federal government more task to do distracts from efforts to make the federal government perform it's given task more efficiently and responsively. If you had an employee that had 10 things to do, but was only able to accomplish one of those things well and the rest either don't get done at all or done to a substandard level, would you give that employee more responsibilities? The same rule applies for government.
- One Size Does Not Fit All - Typically federal programs have one standard that is applied nationally. This can be bad. Not every area in the United States is the same, nor should in my opinion an effort be made to make them all the same. A unified standard sounds good on paper, but applied a unified standard or solution across the board my have varying results by area. Having states or municipalities have the freedom to change up government programs may produce better results because they can take regional and local variances into account. Examples of poorly implemented federal government standards are all too numerous. Two recent examples include Common Core in education and the Affordable Care Act better known as Obamacare.
- Stifling Innovation - When you have 50 states, or 1000's of localities experimenting with what is the best policy solutions to varying problems you have greater innovation that if the federal government just has one program or policy solution that is applied nationally. We loose the creativity of a whole nation and limit ourselves to one solution often thought up by a very small group of bureaucrats.
- Dependency - Our society started out as a group of rugged individuals that were mostly self reliant and came to America to carve out a better life for themselves. As politicians have realized they can get more votes by promising things to the citizenry though federal government programs, Americans are starting to lose their mindset of individual responsibility for a mindset of entitlements. This is a negative feedback loop. Don't get me wrong, their are huge problems with the American economy right now and I'm glad there was help for the millions who have last their jobs (mainly do to outsourcing) recently. Yet even here if American's know there are safety nets will the save for rainy days? Will they plan for the worst case scenario or will they assume someone will be there to catch them when they fall? Numerous examples exist of people who thought the federal government would be there for them in a disaster (I'm thinking mostly of hurricane victims here) only to find they would have been better of if the state, municipalities, or even themselves would have been a better source of disaster recovery planning than the federal government.
- Ideological Normalization and Group Think- We know through political science that typically laws of co-option exists. If you want to work for a company or a government department your chances of getting hired and promoted are enhanced if you share the same ideological sentiments as those doing the hiring. I would argue that over the last 30 years, regardless of what political party bureaucrats claim to belong to, the prevailing ideology in D.C. and the federal government would be center left. Those who aren't center left are filtered out of the system or marginalized over time. Having everyone in government share common ideological leanings also promotes group think and leads to less innovation over time. The federal government is vast and full of ideological variance, but I would argue that there is group think and ideological normalization going on among our public servants, and it is to the detriment of Americans because some of the best solutions to our problems sometimes come from "out of the box" thinking, which normalization and group think tend to diminish.
- Cost - The federal government is 17 TRILLION in the red and on the hook for 100's of Trillions of future entitlement spending. This debt load, quite frankly, is unsustainable. Every effort should be made to reign in federal government spending to a sustainable level. The federal government it's responsibilities should be shrunk not expanded if we ever have any hope of financial viability in the future.
- Responsiveness - Typically the closer decisions are made to those who are affected by them the more responsive and better suited those decisions will be for the stake holders. As more governmental responsibility is transferred to the "center" in D.C. the less responsive it becomes. Let's face it, dealing with state governments is frustrating enough, but dealing a person representing the federal government operating out of a call center 1000's of miles away (and sometimes not even in the USA), where you are just a number, a ticket, a task to fit into an eight hour work day to hit a metric is going to produce less responsive and less quality results to solving your particular problem than if you were dealing with say a local city counsel person.
- Spreading the Benefits of Government Spending - Many are beginning to look at federal government spending as a tool to stimulate the economy. Perhaps this is true but in my opinion this is way over used and currently is just creating more debt without doing much other than to stimulate a few corporate bottom lines and some select bureaucrats in D.C.'s pocket books. Even worse, some are beginning to look at federal government spending as our primary economic engine. This has never worked in societies that have tried this, and it won't work here. I'd like to see the tends in this thinking reversed and having government go back into it's proper (in my opinion) strong regulatory role. But regardless, government spending is not going away, and it will always benefit some. I would like to see those benefits spread out more by having more of that spending happen locally and at state and regional levels. I've heard that four of the seven riches counties in America are all around Washington D.C.. Our centralized federal government employees are getting rich, and spending that money around where they work, and their is an economic uptick in D.C. and the surrounding areas. I would like to have more of that spending dispersed back to the states so that other areas besides D.C. can benefit from whatever economic stimulus does occur. I know the federal government is huge and not all of that spending happens in D.C., but again I think giving more of our tax dollars back to government authorities closer to us would spread that stimulus across the country to a greater degree.
- Harder to Capture Organizations - It is no secret that many federal government agencies have been essentially "captured" by the very industries that regulate. Example so this are the Department of Agriculture and the Securities and Exchange Commission. By dispersing those regulatory functions to the state level (where possible) some people think that by having more and smaller government organizations regulating things closer to home that those organizations would be harder to capture than just one organization that does it all at the federal government level. The jury is still out on that I think, but more targets for big interest to try to influence rather than just a few might be a good thing.
So I hope you can see that there are good reasons to shrink the size and scope of the United States federal government. These reasons are not nefarious but are common sense to make sure we have a sustainable government that is responsive and flexible to the needs of it's citizenry. I did a podcast on this that addressed some of these issues if interested. Thanks for reading.
