On Wed, Apr 30, 1997 at 08:24:27PM -0800, Jim Bell wrote:
At 23:07 4/29/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
3) There is no serious flaw -- the current government isn't as bad as we claim. Or, put another way, the evils we see are a function of size of government, and size of government is more a function of population than anything else -- the larger the population, the larger the government.
I think that strong arguments could be made for any of these, though #3 would be shouted down in this forum.
I disagree that a "strong argument" could be made for item #3. Sure, some people would strenuously ATTEMPT to make that argument, but they would fail miserably.
I feel confident that a statistical analysis of various countries' governments would reveal a wide scatter in the relationship between population and government size. One of the main factors in this scatter is simply the amount that government has decided to butt into activities that could (and should) be privatized. Another is the amount that the government steals from one group in order to reliably receive the votes of some other group.
Population size would end up being a very poor determinant of government size.
Yes, there would be scatter, but it is not important. Population size is *obviously* a strong determinant of government size. Clearly, China (population 1,000,000,000) is going to have a *far* larger government than Dominica (population 100,000). This difference far overshadows the fact that governments for similar sized countries may vary considerably in size -- Dominica will *never* have a government larger than China. You are thinking of the *ratio* of population to government size. That is a factor, but, relatively, an inconsequential one. Country populations vary by orders of magnitude, whereas the scatter you describe might be by one order of magnitude. So, having clearly established that larger countries will on balance have larger governments, we can then just look at organizational dynamics. *Any* large organization requires more infrastructure to function. *Any* large organization will develop bureaucracy. This is true for governments, this is true for businesses, this is true for schools, this is true for militias. A big city police department will have many different precints, with multiple layers of management, a small town will have a chief of police and a few deputies. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html