Georgia10 says:
When the core philosophy of a party is that government cannot work and should do as little as possible, that philosophy benefits only those who have the resources necessary to sustain themselves regardless of whether the government is massive or whether it's so small you can drown it in a bathtub.
It's way worse than this.
They do believe in government, in big government. They believe the role of government is to transfer income and wealth from the general population to a wealthy elite.
They can't say this out loud, but they have never believed in smaller government. They believe in a large intrusive government that plays Robin Hood in reverse.
The evidence is overwhelming.
Just for starters, the smaller government thing is clearly a lie. No Republican Congress, Senate or President has ever proposed a budget smaller than the budget in place the year before. And when they had control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency, the government grew faster than it did under LBJ. We need to stop repeating Grover Norquist's lie about wanting to drown the government in a bathtub. It's a lie. If that happened, Grover would be out of business.
The real money is in oligopoly--in large concentrated industries where a few firms wield monopoly power. In modern America, those industries are protected from breakup, and even directly funded by the government. Under Republicans, they are also protected from regulations meant to ensure that your pet food is made of food, your peanut butter is not contaminated, and your toys are safe for your children to play with.
Oligopolies are also directly funded by the government, by taxpayers. Haliburton, Blackwater, the entire defense contracting industry, telecommunications by the NSA and on and on. Under Republicans, we now know that the spigots open wider, and oversight goes away. They were literally shipping pallets of hundred dollar bills to Iraq. Contracts are awarded without bids, and nobody bothers to account for where the money goes.
That is not small government, my friends.
The major impetuses in the DOHA round at the WTO are, guess what? Protecting agribusiness subsidies and protecting Mickey Mouse's right to never enter the public domain. The current state of "intellectual property*" law in the US is to protect companies from the rabble. Once again, the government, in the Republican world, intervenes on behalf of the gilded classes, at the expense of the consumer and taxpayer.
When oligopolies are protected and subsidized, the result is high prices and low quality. Look around, and what do you see? Expensive, crappy health care. Expensive, unreliable cell phone service. Expensive, slow internet connectivity. Expensive, bloated cable tv. Expensive, unnutritious food "products."
When oligopolies are directly funded, well, there's a word for that: facism. (It's true Republicans are also into the authoritarian thing, but that's a story for another day.) Funding private companies at public expense to do things like spy on citizens or conduct military operations has to with bigger, more intrusive government.
Oh, and of course, when a concentrated industry engages in a decade-long Ponzi scheme, bankrupting millions of citizens, the Republican response is massive bailouts, not of the bankrupted millions, but of the inconvenienced elite.
In fact, what we call this, my friends, is kleptocracy--the use of government power to enrich the elite. You can't do that with small government. You can only do that with a big, Soviet-style kleptocracy.
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*A brilliant bit of spin, in that phrase. The idea of patent and copyright is to facilitate innovatios that eventually enter the public domain, not that they become someone corporation's "property."