If you don’t vote to support people that want to push the system in the directions you favor (or mostly favor, given that no candidate realistically lines up with 100% of your views on everything), then that’s your choice, but don’t be surprised if others don’t take your political committments or viewpoints very seriously.
Voting doesn’t guarantee you’ll win, and your viewpoint does get mixed in with millions of other votes, of course, but it’s a bit like someone unemployed who complains that there is no work, but never bothers to apply for other jobs. You can agree that the environment sucks, and you can even empathize with their frustration, but it’s hard to respect their approach to their predicament.
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And for the record, I don’t think that the bigger the government is, the better. But I do feel the need to push back on the idea that a government that just pays for an army and enforces contracts is the perfect size. There are plenty of market failures where some mechanism other than “whoever has the deepest pockets decides the outcome” needs to govern.
An economy where everything is controlled by a few oligopolists isn’t really that much freer than an economy wehre the state owns everything. Environmental problems are market failures; plenty of markets involve vast information inequities between buyer and seller that thwart the good things about the invisible hand.
The state does have a big problem, which is that (except over the very long term - like decades and centuries), it doesn’t have a disciplining mechanism like the market to eliminate inefficiencies. The closest we have come to something like that is to create mechanisms of democratic control over the state, so that leaders can’t abuse their power with complete impunity. These mechanisms can get corrupted, and that is a big problem.
To some extent, shrinking the state potentially shrinks the powers that can be used corruptly, but the devolution of power can also be corrupt (i.e. when the state devolves its powers in such a way that it favors the interests and friends of those who are currently in power). And the absence of the state also creates opportunities for other forms of corruption or coercion.
Where the line is is always a matter of debate and where our areas of agreement lie, which is why an informed public, and regular electoral activity is important. Not only does it force leaders to be somewhat accountable to the people they govern, it also forces people to think about their positions.
The concentration of wealth over the past 40 years plus the changing media landscape does appear to have made our more classical methods of democratic accountability and governing less effective. Concentration of wealth has made government more “purchaseable,” so that people can run on one platform and then turn around and govern on another (to some extent, this always happened, but seems to have increased).
The internet and media diversity seems to have permitted more and more people to sit in their own echo-chambers rather than engage in a real debate. It’s a tempting draw in an uncertain world - we can get (justifiably) scared about what the future is going to be like for us, and we then find comfort in the fact that at least some people share our views, whether that’s about gun control, financial reform, what wars we are fighting, abortion, whatever. If we’re not careful, we sit and consume our favorite newsviews the way kids will sit and consume Big Macs, not understanding what the problem is, but getting every more angry when people encroach on our space and views.
Anyway, just because I’m not in favor of micro-government doesn’t mean I’m in favor of Big Government. There is a middle ground. When I taught political economy courses, in my last lecture on “course takeaways,” one of my biggest points was “Don’t try to stand in the way of the market unless you have a *very* good reason for it,” “Don’t try to change the rules of the market just to show that you are doing something,” “If you change the rules of the market, be prepared for unanticipated consequences, and try to identify and address least the most obvious ones.” The main message was “Markets aren’t perfect, but don’t be too quick to intervene in them, and if you do, keep as light a hand on them as you can justify.” You may notice a similar approach in my moderating style here on AF.