The Myth of “Big Government”

1. “Dollar Stores Promise ‘Value’ — Deliver Food Deserts and Phantom Prices”
A new USDA analysis finds that when a dollar store opens in a census tract, independent groceries are 2.3% more likely to close, with jobs and sales dropping too — especially in rural areas.

Pair that with recent research and local probes showing dollar chains crowding out full-service markets and routinely overcharging low-income shoppers — including an Ohio Dollar General clocking a 76% error rate in state inspections — and you get corporate “access” that quietly replaces fresh food with junk and surprise markups.

2. “Extreme Weather Torches $20.3 Billion in Crops; Farmers Told to ‘Innovate’”
The American Farm Bureau’s 2024 disaster tally is out: $20.3 billion in crop and rangeland losses from drought, heat, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and hail — more than one-tenth of all economic damage from major US disasters.

Roughly $9.4 billion of that wasn’t covered by insurance at all. Meanwhile, federal policy keeps treating climate chaos as a quirky business risk individual farmers should “adapt” to, not a shared emergency that demands public protection and fossil-fuel–level accountability.

3. “Climate Change Isn’t ‘Future of Farming’ — It’s the Present Tense of Hunger”
A new study in Nature looking at over 12,000 regions in 54 countries finds that for every 1°C of warming, global crop yields drop enough to cut daily calories by up to 120 per person — even after farmers adapt and economies grow.

Rich “breadbasket” regions stand to lose some of the most production, but poorer populations will take the hit in empty plates. In other words: capital can hedge; farmers and eaters can’t.

4. “Food Banks Set Records Again; Hunger Is Now a Fully Privatized Government Program”
Feeding America’s latest Map the Meal Gap says the national food budget shortfall hit a record $33.1 billion in 2022, a 43% jump from prior years, with 44 million people facing hunger.

Axios reports that 65% of US food banks saw higher demand in October 2024 than a year earlier, and local groups like the Federation of Virginia Food Banks say distribution is up about 20% as grocery prices spike.

Policy choice summary: Wall Street gets rate cuts, farmers get disaster checks, and working-class families get in line at the pantry—again.

5. “Meatpacking: Record Profits, Discounted Lives”
COVID-era investigations showed meatpacking workers getting sick and dying at far higher rates than the public, thanks to crowded lines and weak protections; one congressional probe found infections and deaths were “much higher than previously known.”

At the same time, giants like Cargill enjoyed their most profitable years ever, pulling in nearly $5 billion in net income in 2021 alone.

The message of the supply chain is simple: animals and workers go in one door, record earnings come out the other, and somewhere in the middle OSHA gets politely asked not to look too hard.

The story we’re told goes like this: Government is like a monster in an old cartoon. Feed it and it grows. One day it gets too big—too many rules, too many agencies, too many people in cardigans writing memos—and then freedom dies, apple pies evaporate, and someone shows up at your house to ban gas stoves and mandate kale.

Neat story. Very cinematic. Also: complete nonsense.

Because when people say “Big Government,” they almost never mean “the total amount of public spending or number of employees.” They mean “programs I don’t like.” And when they say “Small Government,” they almost never mean “restrained public power across the board.” They mean “cut the stuff that helps other people, don’t touch the stuff that helps me, and by the way the Pentagon budget is sacred.”

The size of government tells you almost nothing about its legitimacy. What it does, for whom, and under whose control—that’s the real fight.

Let’s start with a simple, deeply annoying fact: Americans love a whole buffet of “big government” programs.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are the three-headed hydra in every “we must shrink government” PowerPoint—and also the most popular things the federal government does. They’re the part of “big government” that literally keep people alive.

And yet:

So on Monday, people say “I hate big government.”
On Tuesday, they say “Don’t you dare touch my government health benefits.”
On Wednesday, they yell “Support the troops,” i.e., another gigantic public institution whose budget makes “wasteful spending” lectures look like a sick joke.

This isn’t personal hypocrisy so much as a propaganda success. The phrase “Big Government” has been weaponized so thoroughly that many people genuinely don’t recognize their own lifelines—Social Security checks, public schools, VA care, disaster relief—as the government.

“Big Government” is what other people get. The war machine and the safety net both live in the same budget, but only one of them ever gets treated like a natural fact of life.

“Big” and “small” are vibes, not analysis.

If you look at the actual budget, most federal spending goes exactly where you’d expect in a rich, aging, highly unequal empire:

Screaming “government is too big!” tells you nothing about:

A government can be massive—lots of workers, lots of spending—and still be wildly unjust if most of its muscle is being flexed to:

You don’t need a particularly big state to cut checks to defense contractors, but we have one anyway, and we’ve turned “national security” into a magic phrase that makes trillions in spending untouchable. Meanwhile, the same people who never question a new weapons system will suddenly discover their inner accountant the second you mention free school meals.

On the flip side, a government could be relatively “small” as a share of GDP and still be illegitimate if it shrugs at poverty, lets private monopolies rule whole sectors, and abandons basic infrastructure until bridges are held together with vibes and rust.

“Size” is not the moral variable. It’s just a statistic. The political question is: who gets protected, who gets squeezed, and who gets to decide?

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: most “small government” rhetoric is just “stop spending on them, keep spending on me” in a trench coat.

Some greatest hits:

But say “universal childcare” or “dental coverage under Medicare” and suddenly we have to have an adult conversation about “hard tradeoffs.”

This is what austerity actually looks like in practice: not shrinking the state, but re-aiming it—away from public goods and toward private gain, away from safety nets and toward security forces and weapons contracts. All wrapped in buzzwords like “efficiency,” “fiscal responsibility,” or, my personal favorite, “right-sizing government,” which usually means you get less and Raytheon gets more.

Here’s where the “Big Government” myth gets some of its power: bureaucracy really can be awful.

All of that is real. All of that needs fixing.

But the enemies of “Big Government” don’t generally want to fix it. They want to use that frustration to sell you on something worse:

Public bureaucracy is a design problem and a funding problem. It’s not proof that collective solutions are doomed. In fact, notice how the “too much red tape” lecture almost never gets applied to the Pentagon’s procurement maze or the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. Only the stuff that might directly help you is allegedly too inefficient to live.

Quite often, the bureaucracy is cruel because it was made that way on purpose: austerity, means-testing, and “fraud prevention” turned into a maze that scares people away from benefits so politicians can brag about “savings.”

The answer to that is good governance, not arson:

A rolling process of reform, not a bonfire of everything that makes society livable.

If we actually care whether government power is legitimate, we should be asking three very different questions.

Is it feeding kids, housing people, treating illnesses, enforcing labor laws, protecting the climate, keeping trains from literally falling off the tracks?

Or is it:

Both sets of things are “big government.” Only one is remotely defensible in a society that claims to care about human beings.

Follow the money and suddenly things get very clear.

“Small government” talk is almost always about cutting the first kind of dollar while locking in or expanding the second.

A public agency, in theory, can be pressured:

A private corporation controlling the same essential function? Good luck. You’re a “customer,” maybe. More often, you’re just a data point with a credit score attached.

When we hand over critical systems—healthcare, housing, energy, transportation—to private giants “in the name of efficiency,” we aren’t shrinking government so much as outsourcing power to even less accountable entities. If you think the DMV was bad, wait until you’ve spent three months arguing with an insurance company about whether breathing counts as a “preexisting condition.”

There’s a reason the “Big Government” myth is so persistent: it keeps us from asking the messy questions about which institutions should be strong, and on whose terms.

None of those options are defined by “size.” They’re defined by power: who has it, who doesn’t, and what happens when they clash.

Next time someone says “I just don’t like Big Government,” you can gently—or not so gently—ask:

Government will always be “big” in a complex, modern society. The problems we face—climate collapse, pandemics, aging populations, global supply chains held together with duct tape and prayer—are bigger than what any individual or charity can fix.

The real myth is that we can keep those problems and somehow get by with a dainty little state that minds its manners, never bothers the rich, and always finds room in the budget for one more war.

So forget “big” vs. “small.” Start asking:

If the answer is no, the fix isn’t to starve the public sphere until it collapses. The fix is to take it back—from the donors, from the lobbyists, from the generals and defense contractors—so that when government is “big,” it’s big in the ways that actually keep people alive.