[dxuh]

I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.

[imjonse]

Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.

[boppo1]

No but lots of republicans vote for them actually hoping for smaller less interventionary government, believe it or not. The voters that give them power do not view it as that euphemism.

It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.

[FiberBundle]

Most of these republicans/libertarians only want the government to leave them alone. They don't care when a company they aren't affiliated with is regulated. You can see Marc Andreesen celebrating the government's decision on Anthropic. Similarly, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, libertarians such as David Sacks were loudly calling for government bailouts. It's just hypocrisy all the way up.

[gwerbin]

The entire movement of conservatism in America is a propaganda operation oriented around manufacturing consent for a return to the Gilded Age. It is entirely bankrupt of morals and has been from the beginning. If you personally are a conservative, now is a good time to take a good hard honest look at the history of your movement in American politics. There might even still be time to realign yourself with a movement that isn't actively seeking to harm you.

[mlrtime]

This is garbage reposted in every HN article that starts to talk about any related to politics.

I will gladly live in a conservative county over progressive one. And reading this paragraph in a article about AI is complete nonsense. This is a go touch grass moment if you needed one.

[gwerbin]

I personally repost it everywhere because it is an hypothesis that I believe has strong weight of evidence behind it, and I think it's important to repeat.

Your personal preferences and beliefs have little to do with conservatism at large and the motivations of the powerful people who promote it. If you want to reach a place of open minded debate and discussion in which there can be different legitimate approaches to governing, you have to start with an honest assessment of the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.

The reason it's relevant in an article about AI should be self-evident. AI is powerful, the industry is already massive, and the leaders in that industry are involved in quite a bit of political maneuvering. You may choose to ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.

[grosswait]

The label of libertarian is thought of as a binary by non-libertarians, leading to this perception of hypocrisy, but that is not the way actual libertarians think with the exception of a tiny minority. Libertarianism is a spectrum, just as any other political affiliation or belief system.

This idea that if some group isn’t all reading from the same sheet of music you imagine they should be reading from means they are hypocrites is just wrong.

[renegade-otter]

That's exactly right. The US Government is ruthlessly efficient - yeah, people don't want to hear that. Sure, there are Pentagon-related boondoggles, but that's different.

Try working in a government office - you will be lucky to get a water cooler - BYOW.

"Small government" means "fuck you, I got mine, now let's gut the IRS so I can do some white collar crime".

[_heimdall]

I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.

Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.

The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.

[sharperguy]

In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?

[dxdm]

There's vastly more to politics than that. There's even more to "small" vs "big" government than that, or to who really promises and delivers what. This convenient reduction to handy little words obscures all that, to the point where it stops mapping to reality in a meaningful way. It's a fictional abstraction.

If anything, your question reduces to making one party sound incompetent or deceitful, I don't know if that's intended. (And considering that aspect of the party is another fun can full of real-life worms.)

[randallsquared]

> one party sound incompetent or deceitful

Based on the parent comment, I think it's more "one party sound incompetent and the other deceitful". There was a senator who used to say that American politics was a contest between the stupid party and the evil party.

[trimethylpurine]

> There's vastly more to politics than that.

I thought so in my teens. But now I know that I was naive. How can you be sure that you're not?

[dxdm]

It's stupidly obvious. Politics is about how we organize government and distribute power to solve the problems of living together as a society of individuals. "Big" vs "small" government is a particular way of interpreting one aspect of that. It's an important aspect and a useful perspective, but even if taken at face value it completely neglects other important things like the rules for making policy and their actual content. Of course, the face value of big vs small has become a mask for something else.

But if you've spent the time since your teens to come to the opposite conclusion in spite of everything going on around, then I suspect there will be very little I can say to you that will make sense to you.

[trimethylpurine]

Oh everything you said makes sense so long as I imagine wrongly that everyone is doing what's best for society, and that's why they got into politics.

But politics is really about negotiating ownership in companies that the politician will approve for government projects. And if you aren't doing that, then no other politicians will care to work with you, because it's not profitable for them. You'll be an irrelevant politician that accomplished nothing.

Which side of the aisle you sit on is more typically about where your lobbyists' marketing team agreed would better depict their brand, actually having very little to do with big or small government. Both sides want big government because it means more money for big projects for companies that they will or do own in part.

Sorry to dishearten you if you planned on going into politics.

[dxdm]

Well, you could stop undermining what you seem to care for.

You don't have to "wrongly imagine" anything. Everyone not doing what's "best for society" is how the world works, authoritarianism and the rule of rich elites is the default that everything wants to regress to. There are only ever islands where people managed to push this back towards the corners and make room for more of us.

Human societies have taken millenia to come up with a system (or a few similar systems) which have a chance of holding things somewhat at bay. Is it perfect? Far from it. Does it work? Just honestly compare how things are for disadvantaged or even normal, ordinary people in places that work differently. Could it be better? You bet, there's lots to criticize. But notice that you _can_ criticize. Usually, elsewhere, you can't. Is it getting worse? Yes. The lesson is that you have to keep defending this system that gives you a chance to hold people to account and remove them from power.

Comments like yours above, which claim that everything is maximally bad and rigged, do nothing but help things decay further. "There's nothing that can be done! It's the same everywhere! Why even try?" That's how you get other people to stop caring, too, and then the real assholes take over. You're playing right into their hands. You think it's already as bad as it gets? You think you're no longer naive? Well, then maybe you're doing this on purpose; or you're just a new kind of naive. Either way: you are an active part of this problem.

[anabab]

Looks like those in favor of small government should not vote - to apply evolutionary pressure instead of rewarding unacceptable behavior

[Grombobulous]

The second biggest problem with this comment is that the conclusion we must take from it if we buy into your statement is that we shouldn’t bother voting.

We would not have a costly war in Iran, blockaded Strait of Hormuz, $6-7/gallon gas, or blanket import tariffs hiking up the prices of consumer staple goods if we voted for the “party that promises bigger government and does deliver.”

I would submit the idea that the latter party is consistently misrepresented and has been the only one that has delivered smaller budget deficits anytime recently.

See also: Tax Cut and Jobs Act, the Kansas Experiment.

The truth of the matter is, our elites are undertaxed at historic levels. At no point in our lifetime have the wealthy been taxed at a lower rate than they are today. There isn’t actually anything wrong with government spending outside of the endless/aimless wars (started by…). It’s the revenue side that deserves scrutiny.

[sharperguy]

Considering the Trump administration's policy on Isreal / Palestine / Iran seems to be a direct follow-on from the previous administration, I'm not so sure about that assertion.

[seattle_spring]

Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).

[mkl95]

> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.

It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.

[verandaguy]

Right, but both of those examples are terrible ideas on their face.

On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.

And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.

As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.

[underlipton]

Not that I disagree, but it should be asked: Retribution for what? The answers are, generally:

>COVID restrictions

>The state of the economy

>The state of culture, broadly-speaking

>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)

I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)

[embedding-shape]

> Americans voted for Trump hoping

There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.

[mkl95]

From an EU perspective it can look complicated. But when you look at the data, the American electorate is relatively simple-minded. For example: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...

[embedding-shape]

Why would "EU perspective" make it look more or less complicated? People are people everywhere, regardless of country.

> the American electorate is relatively simple-minded

It's favorable for many people who don't agree with the current administration to believe so, I'm not sure how true it is in practice, and again, I believe believing so might hurt your chances of actually understanding things properly. That sort of bias really get in the way.

> https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...

> findings from our post-election survey among 5,000 self-reported 2024 general election voters

Again, more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump, you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people.

[mkl95]

> you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people

A sample size of ~2500 is statistically huge - the margin of error is very small. You should sign up to a stats course.

[embedding-shape]

You should head outside and actually talk with real humans, no stats course is gonna teach you human understanding.

[gpvos]

Self-reported though; that throws a huge spanner in the works.

[goatlover]

Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.

[sdthjbvuiiijbb]

>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.

I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".

I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.

[mvdtnz]

That is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.

[bryanrasmussen]

despite not doing what they claim to do, this is still what they always claim to do.

[otikik]

“Advertising” vs “doing”

[olalonde]

Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.

[dudefeliciano]

> Those days are long gone. > Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.

So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"

[AlotOfReading]

I know it's not what you mean, but Lincoln dramatically shrank the size of the Confederate government.

[olalonde]

Trump is much more of a statist than previous Republican presidents (and arguably Democratic ones as well).

[Marazan]

"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.