Zohran Mamdani, the illegal alien soon to assume the mayoralty of New York City, shocked many with his declaration that “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no problem too small for government to care about.”
It’s a far cry from the Clinton-era realization that “the era of big government is over.”
Today’s Democrats – and no, not just the self-proclaimed ‘Democratic Socialists,’ but all of them – are acolytes of the big government religion.
Many are horrified by both clauses of Mamdani’s declaration, but they are very different statements.
The former is clearly wrong, as immoral as it is incorrect. The United States has been committed to the principles of limited government since our founding, and even before; most of the settlers who fled foreign nations to settle North America were fleeing dictatorial kingdoms and empires for free lands with free people.
True Americans have no interest in thinking that “there is no problem too large for government to solve,” both because it’s immoral for government to meddle in every aspect of life, and because in the vast majority of cases, government is doomed to fail, being infinitely less efficient than the private sector in almost all aspects of life.
But the latter clause is more nuanced. Yes of course, lots of problems are too small for government to be involved in, but that’s not the same as saying it shouldn’t care about them. The fact that government should care about every interest group, every demographic, every need, is exactly why government should stay small: because when government acts, it affects so many groups, so many individuals, so many issues, it can never avoid hurting some of them. And that’s why it must stay out of most issues: because when it does choose to get involved, there is bound to be collateral damage.
As Winston Churchill put it, “Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away — you may put money in the pockets of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way.”
Whatever Mayor-elect Mamdani proposes to give to his constituents (for free), he or his cronies in government will have to have taken from them – or from their employers or neighbors or grandparents or grandchildren – in the first place.
A key job of government, therefore – big or small, therefore, but all the more so with big government – is to constantly analyze every possible area of collateral damage from every potential policy before going through with it.
To protect our borders with a military, we must have an onerous taxing structure. To protect medical patients from quacks and snake-oil salesmen, we must have a costly medical licensing and pharmaceutical testing bureaucracy. To protect individuals from robbers and killers, we must fund a massive criminal justice system, with police and courts and prisons.
As good as these ends are, the enabling institutions are expensive, sure to cost the economy in funding and cost the individual in personal freedom, at least to some extent.
Government must constantly agonize over how far to go, even in these arenas of general agreement.
When we go beyond these arenas, and government encroaches into subjects that principles of limited government would never support, the list of those unintentionally hurt increases exponentially.
Consider, for example, the desire to “save the planet from manmade climate change” – a foolish quest from the beginning, since it’s based on the ridiculous notion that CO2 poses a danger. But if only individuals believed that silliness, it would be harmless to civilization. Only when government latches onto this hogwash as a “problem for government to solve” does it become destructive.
In government’s battle against CO2, governments the world over have banned or curtailed efficient energy sources such as petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear, wasting countless billions of tax dollars on the criminal inefficiency of plastic solar panels and concrete and steel windmills.
The inevitable result has been the loss of productive agricultural land, the deaths of millions of birds and aquatic life, the enrichment of China’s military, increased utility bills and food costs, and dangerous power outages that compromise food refrigeration and turn hospitals and nursing homes into deathtraps.
When government chooses to tackle that big issue – climate change – it has to research all those small byproducts too, all those little problems and interest groups “too small not to care about.”
But they don’t really look at them, do they? In practice – despite Zohran Mamdani’s pontifications – they look at the big issues and they lose interest in the little ones, perhaps because it’s so darned much work to study all the side effects, all the unintended consequences, that in the end, it’s just so much easier to leave them alone, to not both looking at the little things at all… even though it’s the little things – the poor, the marginalized, the unrepresented – who need government’s care most of all.
The big government crowd issues big public announcements – “We’re funding another 50,000 acres of solar panels!” – and then they disregard the rest, leaving the injured and impoverished who are destroyed by their programs to suffer in silence.
No matter how hard the government may try to write laws to cover every aspect of life, it simply can’t – and shouldn’t. Sometimes the issues they miss cause pain; sometimes we’re better off for the misses.
Look at the high cost of beef, which the government has tackled so many ways, always making it worse. The government’s energy policy has made domestic transportation and processing more expensive, so companies ship meat to China to be processed. The government has redesignated government lands to either stay wild and unused (for ‘nature’) or to serve as these massive solar farms, severely reducing the land available for grazing. The government wants to help our beef-producing trading partners, so they write laws to increase the importation of beef from Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina.
Forgotten in this jumble of competing “big issues” is the cattle industry, the American ranchers who actually raise the cattle to produce American beef. American beef could be competitive with that foreign beef – if our government prioritized land for grazing rather than wasting it on unproductive solar farms, and if we didn’t subsidize imported beef to compete with our own wonderful domestic beef.
The government requires country of origin labeling for most products, but they “forgot” to require it for beef. So even if a patriotic consumer wants to buy American-grown beef, he can’t usually tell, because the imported beef doesn’t have to be marked as imported, like imported clothes or tools or furniture would have to be.
And consider the thoughtful concept of the “beef checkoff” program, in which cattlemen and meat packers are specifically taxed to promote American beef, but since the packers are more powerful than the cattlemen, this jointly-funded project just promotes beef in general, essentially taking American cattlemen’s money to promote foreign beef. Did government mean for it to work out that way? Even well-intentioned bureaucrats simply can’t possibly think through every “small problem” that their “big problem” motives cause in the process.
But when an over-extended government tries to be the jack of all trades, it is certain to become the master of none – and in the end, most likely, the disabler of most.
Government can never fully identify every interest group that is harmed by government’s efforts; government can never do anything good without doing at least some related damage as well.
The lesson that today’s Democrat voters need to learn – a lesson which our Founding Fathers knew instinctively, 250 years ago – is that, outside of a very, very narrow group of issues that the public sector can indeed do better than the private, the best result for virtually everyone in society is if the government would, in almost all cases, just stay the heck out of the way.
The best way to help the vast majority of people is to – perhaps for the first time in generations – leave them alone.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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