Big Government, but Actually

So, I've written before about how I dislike the phrase "big government," or at least the way it gets used these days. This week's disaster in Ferguson, Missouri, where yet another young, unarmed black man was shot and killed by police and where those same police have responded to the wave of protests said murder occasioned by using military equipment on their own citizenry, is, I think, a really powerful demonstration of that point. Because this is big government, real big government. This is government which is big not in its budget or in its bureaucracy but in its capacity for physical force. And let's remember, physical force is what makes a government a government. Literally, governments are defined by their relationship to violence. That's how you tell what's the government in any given area, really: you look to see who has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Well, I say "legitimate," because I guess they're only one competitor in the illegitimate-use-of-force market, if a rather major player. And so I think the most meaningful possible sense of the phrase "big government" has got to be a government with an aggrandized relationship to violence. Like, say, a government which has gone around equipping local police forces with military equipment mainly because it (the military equipment) was there, meaning that the so-called "War on Drugs" just had to turn itself into an actual, literal war against the American people, or rather against those of the American people who have the misfortune of dark-colored skin. That's what we're seeing in Ferguson, and that's what's really worth railing against. That and the highly-related surveillance state form of "big government." There's a pretty good reason to think that a government which is spying on its populace and which has in essence armed itself against that populace as against an enemy military power is doing something wrong, and is at the very least a pretty real threat to the people it's meant to serve. There's no great a priori reason to think that a government with many regulations or with a large budget is doing something wrong. One of these things deserves to have the derisive "big government" label slapped on it, the other doesn't. At least Rand Paul has the decency to object to both.