Fallacy:
Sure, government excesses in taxation and regulation are bad, but I believe in limited government. If only we get the right people into power, everything will be great!
Response:
What government has ever stayed limited?
- Statism is the utopian ideal that just the right amount of violence used by just the right people in just the right way can perfect society. (Author Unknown)
As Rothbard tells us,
- The libertarian is also eminently realistic because he alone understands fully the nature of the State and its thrust for power. In contrast, it is the seemingly far more realistic conservative believer in “limited government” who is the truly impractical utopian. This conservative keeps repeating the litany that the central government should be severely limited by a constitution. Yet, at the same time that he rails against the corruption of the original Constitution and the widening of federal power since 1789, the conservative fails to draw the proper lesson from that degeneration. The idea of a strictly limited constitutional State was a noble experiment that failed, even under the most favorable and propitious circumstances. If it failed then, why should a similar experiment fare any better now? No, it is the conservative laissez-fairist, the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, “Limit yourself”; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.
And of course, Lysander Spooner takes to task a particular example of supposed "limited government"—the US constitution—in Books/NoTreason, and concludes:
- But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
Related: ../Libertopia