(This is one of a weekly series of posts entitled “A Centrist’s Platform”. The complete collection of Centrist’s Platform posts is available on a single page, or via a special RSS feed.)
Once upon a time, I was a card carrying Libertarian. The idea of a political party whose views fit my own socially liberal, economically conservative perspective was very appealing…at least until I realized that LP activists lacked realism.
That’s the reason I tend to describe myself as a “small ell-libertarian” or a centrist.
One of the factors that drove me away from the LP and back to a land of relative sanity is the tendency for some Libertarians to be so anti-government that they sound almost anarchist.
While I am definitely opposed to large, invasive, inefficient government…I’m not so sure that a small, minimalistic government is a good idea either.
There is a definite role for government in society. Certain services and functions of government are a good thing for society in general, and probably shouldn’t be farmed out to for-profit privatization. Exactly which services and functions those are is a subject for a debate beyond the scope of this article, but I submit that they exist.
I wonder if the problem many of us perceive with government isn’t that it’s “too big”. I wonder if the problem is that the government is “too visible”.
I would love to have a government that was invisible — one that operated so smoothly and efficiently that one hardly notices it in operation except in those hopefully rare circumstances where one has to come into contact with it.
Think about it — what portion of your complaints with the government entail either intentional headline-grabbing on the part of certain government officials, or certain government operations being broken or horribly inefficient, or certain government bureaus seemingly extending their power beyond what is actually necessary to do their jobs?
Like big-ell Libertarians, I want the government to leave me alone. However, I don’t think that that desire necessarily devolves to a near-anarchy of minimal government. Instead, I wish for a government that was invisible, yet effective…one which I could trust to ignore completely if I so chose.
I know, it’s an overly idealistic, horribly unrealistic and impractical desire of mine…but I can wish, can’t I?