Those who are old enough to remember actual phonebooks can recall the color-coded sections that made finding the object of your search easier.  There were yellow pages for businesses, white pages for residences, and blue pages for government pages. These blue pages contained page after page of federal, state, county and town government listings. Within these pages were hundreds of offices, agencies, departments, and bureaus, all at your fingertips, ostensibly offering solutions of one kind or another.  A thousand points of contact between the people and their government? Or something else? These pages embody what has become of the country, a country pierced by the countless tentacles of government at all levels, so pervasive as to simply be part of the background noise. That is, until that government decides your nonprofit doesn’t match up with its views or it decides your bakery has to bake a cake whether it wants to or not.  We’ve become desensitized to bureaucrats’ relentless expansion of power with the inevitable loss of liberty. 

One of the 2012 Republican presidential debates inadvertently highlighted the seriousness of the problem with the question about which federal government departments the candidates might close. These Republican and even conservative politicians acquitted themselves badly. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry flubbed his response by forgetting one of the two departments he’d close.  But in a much more important sense all the candidates failed the test. The conservative answer to this question is: which departments would you keep open? The only way to get a smaller government in size and scope is to make the government smaller. Arguing over slowing the increase in the growth of government will never make that happen. The current collection of candidates doesn’t seem to understand this any more than Perry or any of the others did.

People have to be retaught that their very lives do not depend on whether there are departments of education, commerce, labor, health and human services, interior, and energy. The same goes for the IRS, EPA and the Postal Service. A wrecking ball must swing through the brick and mortar government colossus. People will learn that government can actually be only as big as it needs to be based on its constitutional responsibilities. The sky won’t fall and they’ll get along fine without a nanny state telling them what to eat and what kind of car to drive. Then we can have an adult conversation about the death spiral economics of entitlement and welfare programs that will make the nearly $19 trillion debt look like pocket change. Merely paying lip service to smaller government won’t cut it; the Republicans have a responsibility to do what they can to make it smaller.

Mike Phelps is the author of the 2008 book A Short History of the Long War: The Global Struggle Against Militant Islamism.