Time to blow it up:
A smaller government would mean fewer phony-baloney jobs for college graduates with few marketable skills but demonstrated political loyalty. It would mean fewer opportunities for tax dollars to be directed to people and entities with close ties to people in power. It would mean less ability to engage in social engineering and “nudges” aimed at what are all-too-often seen as those dumb rubes in flyover country. The smaller the government, the fewer the opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement — and graft and self-aggrandizement are what our political class is all about.
A more accountable government would be, in some ways, an even greater nightmare. Right now, when the federal government screws up, people often don’t find out — look at how the IRS and the State Department have stonewalled efforts to find out what happened with the Tea Party audits or the Benghazi debacle — and even when word gets out, it’s rare that anybody loses their job. (The EPA knew that Flint, Michigan’s water was toxic for months and didn’t tell anyone. Will there be consequences? Doubtful.)
Most of the time, the bureaucracy acts without any real oversight from Congress, or from the public. It’s able to enact political agendas that, if put to an open vote, would never pass. And to the bureaucracy’s supporters, that’s not a bug, but a feature.
It is indeed.
Well, two-thirds vote in both House and Senate sounds difficult. But what about two-thirds of state legislatures calling for a constitutional convention? Republican hold an awful lot of state legislatures right now. You’d need three-fourths to ratify?
This is a place where states count.
Calling a convention would be depicted by the dominant media as the end of social security, welfare, scientific investment, clean drinking water etc etc etc. Ain’t gunna happen.
I can certainly see it happening. Every state has something they want. Washington would put legal marijuana on the agenda. Many states would do it for banning abortion.
Saying that smaller government is better is like saying less cancer is a good idea. The problem is that government is crack. Every time you expand it, you hand out more jobs and more payouts depending on big government status quo. Eventually, you end up with vote farms that allow the pro-cancer party a sustainable ecosystem which can’t be shut down without pissing off 10s of millions. Before gov growth went unstable, the left would constantly whine about the military industrial complex as a Republican vote farm. So they got their own eco-education-social welfare vote farm that’s many times worse. The only cure for this kind of cancer, unfortunately, is a total economic collapse and there’s no guarantee the constitutional system will survive that.