I think the Grover rule of thumb is...if government tries to regulate business for the benefit of citizens its too big. If government tries to regulate individual behavior, who we can marry, whether or not a woman can have an abortion that is appropriate use of regulation. Clumsy I know but I think it works!

Great, putting it all in perspective. I can't picture our sports fans chanting we're number 3, we're number 3!

Grover was born to the elite. His only relevance is in his ability to control Republicans. It makes him feel important. He's never built anything, he's never invented anything. He's just another spoiled rich kid who thinks his ideas are better than anyone Else's. It is time he was exposed and those Republicans who sign the pledge and kiss the ring of Grover who? need to rethink to whom they are supposed to be pledging their allegiance.

I really cannot understand how any intelligent person can believe that a huge, enormously complicated social and economic system like the US can be expected to run smoothly in a way that is satisfactory to the majority of its members all by itself? Will that system be fairer, more efficient, with less crime and injustice, and provide more satisfaction to more people than a system that has some controls?
Jim Shea

David Benjamin, you want big? There’s plenty of big stuff going on here in the old USA, you just aren’t looking in the right places. Stuff like the Hoover Dam, the highway system, and all that are so old school. If you’re looking for things like developing the infrastructure for the good of all, finding clean energy solutions to our obvious problems of spewing out toxins to the great detriment and encroaching destruction of much of the planet, or extending medical treatment to all, you’re looking in all the wrong places.

No, the big stuff we do is way different now. Just like the British Raj, which was really big, we’ve managed to invade other countries for corporate profit. Only what we’ve done is much bolder. While no western nation would think twice about commandeering such an odd place as India in the eugenic Raj age, just as we had no problem stealing California from those obviously inferior Mexicans or invading the Phillipines, we’ve managed to overcome the truth that all men are created equal—something the Civil rights movement seemed to clarify for the US--and any quandaries concerning invading sovereign nations without provocation—something we thought we’d settled after WW!!. We’ve wiped out all such ideas about the rights of men and nations. That’s huge.

We’ve managed to invade little, poor places like Haiti, Granada, and Panama with few questioning why they pose a national threat. We’ve destabilized the Mideast for decades, creating in the process enough anger over there that most of us justified spending trillions on beating the people of Afghanistan and Iraq back to the stone age—and just when people are finally starting to wake up to at least one fact, that this is pauperizing our nation, we’re on to Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria, and God knows what the CIA is cooking up elsewhere. We’ve helped Israel crush Palestine, we’ve got our sites on Iran. We've created violence in Mexico with our stupid, ludicrously corrupt drug war, dispersed the Afghan opiates across the world, and managed to create increasingly wretched conditions for a poor undercaste while droning on about diversity. Oh, for decades we’ve screwed up countries in Africa and Central America, grumbled ominously about Venezuala, on and on. Add to the list.

We’ve become the bully of the world, a big bully wearing 50 pounds of military crap, carrying big weapons with DU bullets, sitting in big tanks as a desperate population scares the shit out of us with explosives cooked up In their kitchens. Or better yet, we play video games in safety and comfort that launch real drones to terrorize whole nations, killing their children and other innocents. We’ve managed to destroy nations under the belief that you have to destroy them to save them, that it’s all about hearts and minds, with hardly a squawk of “remember Vietnam? Remember Korea?” You don’t think that’s big?

You don’t think it’s big that we’ve succeeded in subverting the history, political science, and economics departments, thanks to the nonprofits and the Heritage Foundation, destoy philosophy, destroy any education that might make people capable of understanding what is going on or seeing the glaringly obvious lies? The subversion of academia since the McCarthy era is no big deal? That our children get the worst education lots of money can buy, thanks to corporate "philanthropy"? The buy-up of our medical education by Big Pharma is no big deal? The use of our psychology and psychiatry expertise toward the ends of social control and torture is no biggy? You don’t think it’s big that they’ve got this population used to pervasive surveillance, destroyed our rights to privacy and assembly? You don’t think that Citizens United was a big project, requiring a massive move toward less and less justice from administration to administration and moving the left to the right and the right to batshit? Add to the list.

We’ve become a hugely destructive, corrupt force in the world, and if anyone tries to point this out, they can expect our most brilliant genius, that crown of our bigness—a hypnotized, psyopped, dumbed-down and fearful population, coupled with a great police state that is above any sane laws and at the ready—to bear down on those who make any attempt to dissent. That’s really big.

There've been moments in our history, glimmers, where you could say this nation had a sense of communal responsibility and ethics. It's long gone, and the ramifactions are astounding. Beyond big, brother.

"How, for example, did we get started? We picked a war, without first actually putting together either a government or an army, against the largest, richest empire in human history."

Erm, haven't you just undermined your own argument? Grover Norquist could take that quote and use it to prove that you don't need governments in order to achieve big stuff.

"How, for example, did we get started? We picked a war, without first actually putting together either a government or an army, against the largest, richest empire in human history. Other countries — who had kings, queens, armies, navies, treasuries — had tried beating the British Empire. Spain and France tried. They got their asses kicked.

But we beat the redcoats. We booted George III. Was that big? It was huge, man!"

Spain and France individually had tried, but they weren't ever in it all or nothing. Besides, we lost hideously before virtually the whole of Europe rose against Britain and made their dominance of the seas a tossup. Without assured access to the colonies, they couldn't really get at us, much less beat us. That's not to say that we were anywhere near as effective against them as Hollywood would have you believe. Like I said, we were losing - hideously.

Yeah, go big or go home! USA, USA!

Love the piece.

It's time to drown Grover Norquist in a bathtub. We'll call it his "enhanced interrogation".

William Blum recently stated that it's not how big the government is, it's who it serves.

Chomsky has made a similar argument, stating that devolution of power under corporatism may actually take power away from the people because the only entity large enough to challenge corporations is the federal government.

The problem as I see it is that super-powerful, highly centralized entities presiding over gargantuan land masses are not likely to serve the common good for any length of time. Rather they are likely to attempt to accrue more and more power to themselves while eventually expanding that power even further through foreign conquest. This, in turn, undermines social programs and democracy at home.

There's a fascinating book on this very subject entitled "The Breakdown of Nations" by Leopold Kohr. He argues that throughout history, large, powerful, centralized states have been far more likely to engage in imperialism. It's hard to argue the point. The anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin suggested smilar -- "small states are virtuous only because of their weakness".

So I'm not sure it's quite as simple as Blum argues. Perhaps size does matter after all.

I don't think Republicans are necessarily wrong in arguing that "big government is bad". What they generally fail to appreciate is that the primary PURPOSE of the Constitutional Convention was to erect a strong, centralized government in order to crush the nascent spirit of democracy in the colonies, as well as debtor riots like Shay's. Indeed Madison explicitly referred to size as an an important factor in preventing real democracy, or "factionalism" as he liked to refer to it. Perhaps Republicans do realize this, which is why they never talk about slashing military or police spending under their "big government is horrible" paradigm.

"Small government" is code-speak for gutting social services. However that doesn't mean small government is itself a bad idea. Ideally, the purpose should indeed be to eliminate government (ie the control of individuals by hierarchical structures), but that also entails all types of other coercion besides that of the state, including most of what we call capitalism. When Grover talks about "government" he is referring ONLY to the state, which is at least more democratic than the "private tyrannies" called corporations.

Anarchists have always stressed a dual tendency of decentralization and federation, which strengthens solidarity on the one hand and allows for personal freedom and direct democracy on the other. The Iroquois Federation is a pretty good example of "bottom up" decision making or "(lack of) government" spread out over large populations.

Putting it into practice in the here and now is another matter entirely. A common sense approach is of course to support government programs which help people and oppose those that don't. William I. Robinson, who has written extensively on globalization, argues that the left has become too dogmatic in its embrace of horizontalism, and that we need to search for a blending of the horizontal and vertical. Eric Frohmm made a similar critique of the anarchists. Nevertheless I remain highly skeptical that centralized power can serve the interests of the public over the long term; at the very least people should push against the tendency toward top-down decision making whenever possible.

Just a few thoughts for those interested....

That's a great piece, David B.!

FDR's really BIG solution was to do all he could to rally a reluctant nation to war, that really big awesomely "good war". So that's it, Obama's BIG FDR solution is WWIII, yeah, great solution, and the bigger the better! I can't wait. I'm gonna buy a 72" big screen HDTV so I can watch the giant mushroom clouds in brilliant color! I hope Lockheed Martin and GE have some really cool halftime commercials. I bet they're going to be really swell!

USA! USA!