Contradiction in terms: There’s no such thing as ‘limited government’

By David McElroy · February 20, 2012

Conservatives keep telling us they want “limited government.” When you think about their positions, you might think they just don’t understand limited government. There’s a more serious problem, though. “Limited government” is a mythical beast that can’t exist.

Take this tweet from Rick Santorum last week. It sounds very appealing to those of us who love individual freedom. A libertarian or anarcho-capitalist could have said this. But think about the rest of what Santorum favors and you quickly realize he doesn’t mean what these words say.

If Santorum and other conservatives believe that government can’t force us to pay for things that violate our beliefs, does this mean he’s going to fight to get refunds for those of us who’ve had to pay for wars against our will? Is he going to try to get us refunds for the money that’s been taken from us to give to other countries in the form of handouts and military hardware? Is he going to prevent our money from being used to support various kinds of social and economic welfare programs that we don’t believe in?

“Government” is force, whether it’s open or hidden. By definition, if a government can’t force you to do anything, it’s not a government. It’s just somebody making suggestions. The real question is whether any kind of government has any moral right to initiate force against anyone.

For people who believe in limited government, it seems simple. They say that government can use force against anyone — only in limited circumstances. But who’s to decide which circumstances? Santorum thinks it’s immoral to require people to pay for contraception that violates their beliefs. I agree. Someone on the progressive left might say that it’s immoral to require people to pay for wars that violate their beliefs. I would agree with that, too. But Santorum thinks you should be required to pay for his wars. The leftist thinks you should be required to pay for the social services he wants to provide.

So who decides? The majority? That brings up all sorts of different issues. What if a majority elect people they agree with on certain big issues, but aren’t in agreement on “smaller” issues? Does that mean it’s OK for a minority to get their way on those “smaller” issues, just because they’re not important to enough people to swing elections? And even if the majority agree on everything — which isn’t possible, of course — what gives that majority the right to impose their will on the minority?

Isn’t this just setting the stage for a constant war of all against all?

Limited government is an illusion. If you’re going to favor some form of the coercive state, you have to admit that you favor a dictatorship with a monopoly on power. You might have certain preferences about how the power is exercised, but once you put the beast into place, your preferences don’t matter to it one bit.

There’s a quote frequently attributed to Thomas Jefferson that says, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.” It’s a popular line with those who favor limited government, because they say it shows why government has to be small and limited. But Jefferson didn’t actually say or write the words. And the truth is that any government that’s given a monopoly on power — for any limited purpose — is eventually going to take whatever it wants.

Even though Jefferson didn’t say those words, we can say that he worked hard to set up a limited government. The beast that rules over us today is proof of exactly what happens to “limited government” over time. The world has never seen limited government. It never will.

People frequently tell me that they’re afraid of the competitive governance model, because they’re afraid it won’t work. I think they’re mistaken — for reasons that I’ve spent years thinking through — but I can’t prove it to them. The only thing I can prove is that they’re oddly willing to bet on something that’s always proven to fail over something that’s never been tried. That sounds pretty strange to me.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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