[ave_b_2011]

The country is almost 340 million people.

That’s 340,000,000 individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and geographies.

They wake up every morning and go about their lives. Things like planes need to stay in the air, water needs to be clean, trains need to not derail in the middle of towns, dams need to stay not only structurally sounds but in some cases keep producing electricity.

The USA is the fourth largest country by area in the entire world.

To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.

[6figurelenins]

> To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.

I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1].

It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth.

Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself.

Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#H...