The End of Big Government

Ask not what your government can do for you – ask what you can do for yourself.

The British have a habit of leading the way.

In the 1980s, it was Margaret Thatcher who first swept to power on a platform of minimal government. In the 1990s, it was Tony Blair who led the way in developing the “Third Way” important to the New Labour project. The pattern is repeating itself again today.

It is the British that have taken the most drastic measures to get government deficits under control. David Cameron’s Conservative government has recently announced an £81-billion cuts package, which will reduce departmental budgets by an average of 19 per cent and claim up to 500,000 public sector jobs by 2014-15.

Most interesting, however, is their “Big Society” agenda including the reform of welfare, social services, education, and even policing. They plan to empower local governments, support charities and social enterprises, as well as to elect local police commissioners. Recently, they announced plans for a single integrated Universal Credit to replace unemployment benefits and various tax credits. It is David Cameron’s government that is turning away from centralized bureaucracies and towards citizen and local control.

In a time of austerity and overwhelming ambivalence towards government, the trend for social services, education, and health care is towards decentralization, choice, and simplification. Gone are the days of big, complicated, top-down social programs.

The trend is emerging in Canada, too.

The Conservative government’s Universal Childcare Benefit Program is a perfect example. A centralized, government-run daycare program is not the preferred option for many Canadian parents. Instead, Canadians are free to make the childcare choices that best suit their needs and preferences. The government simply enables those choices.

The recent Liberal Family Care Plan is heading down the same path. The Liberal Party has proposed a six-month Family Care Employment Insurance Benefit and Family Care Tax Benefit so Canadians can care for family members at home. The proposal would enable Canadians to care for ill or elderly family members in the way that best suits their own needs and preferences.

We live in a time when choices in goods and services are almost infinite. Access to information and markets is widespread. Government, however, is a holdout. Government still expects us to fit their systems rather than have the systems serve us.

Over the years, government intervention has crowded out social institutions as providers of social goods. It is time to replenish and maximize the space for the “little platoons” of society; indeed, it is our civic duty. Simply paying our taxes is not fulfilling our obligations to one another. We should be a people who volunteer, vote, donate to charity, and are otherwise civically engaged.

As Prime Minister Cameron said in an October speech, the future requires “government that believes in people, that trusts people, that knows its ultimate role is not to take from people but to give, to give power, to give control, to give everyone the chance to make the most of their own life and make better the lives of others.” We should always ask first: what am I going to do? Only then should we ask what the government could do to enable my family, my community, my business, and me.

Gone are the days of big, complicated, top-down social programs, and no one should lament the passing.