The arguments against big government are fairly straight-forward and they often dominate our political conversation. <\/p>\n
Taxes gobble up our hard-earned money, preventing us from spending and investing freely. <\/p>\n
Regulation stifles freedom and innovation.<\/p>\n
Surely, bureaucrats aren’t the best people to run an economy. Leave that to the bankers, right?<\/p>\n
Obviously, it’s a lot more complicated than that. <\/p>\n
Conservatives have tried to make the case that the Great American Recession was caused by Big Government meddling.<\/p>\n
But most of that’s just politics.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of experts will tell you that the finance industry, having moved into new and largely unregulated territory, shot itself in the head.<\/p>\n
The rest of us were collateral damage.<\/p>\n
But set aside, for the moment, that kind of controversial and complicated debate. <\/p>\n
And set aside heated questions about whether the private sector failed to find ways to insure and deliver affordable health care to tens of millions of Americans.<\/p>\n
You will still find big bread-and-butter cases where it appears that we would have been safer with more — not less — government.<\/p>\n
Exhibit A is the Toyota automobile recall. <\/p>\n
This major international corporation allegedly concealed for months the fact that its cars “had a tendency for mechanical failure in accelerator pedals of a certain manufacturer on certain models.\u201d<\/p>\n