A primary issue of government is that regardless of the political affiliation it suffers from scalability issues, as a population grows, government grows. As government grows the amount of money needed to support it will often grow at a rate that exceeds the net economic units created by the population growth. In simple terms as a population grows the net income produced by taxes will not be enough to cover the new cost of government because of inefficiency. Whether you support it or not, this is further made worse by social features of government which will have an additional uncontrolled cost.
In a hyperbolic example if a road system costs $1000 to make there will need to be a government management fee to pay for management of said project, for this example we will say $100. In order to pay for the $1000 project $1100 would need to be collected. This is fine since most social projects people understand the utility of and most would not contend the management fee. What happens in reality however is that as the population grows the management fee does not grow in a predictable fashion because of system complexity so what will end up happening is that the developer of the road project will either be paid a sub-optimal fee or a provider will be selected that can work at a sub-optimal fee which will result in lower then average quality product. The other option of course is that the inefficiency cost will be subsidized by credit, a possible unending black hole.
As the demand for social services increases there is only one possible way it can be economically feasible and this is through reduction of government size. This will sound contradictory to expectation and the views of most that support social programs but the reality is that now we are in a situation to actually make this a reality. No longer does an increase of population need to translate into an increase of government work force. No other time in history would of this ever been possible and that is because of technology. With the emergence of computers, computerized automation, and artificial intelligence we can now start moving a lot of required government functions to electronics. There are hurdles to this of course because many of the efforts that could be automated would cost the jobs of the people responsible for implementing such automations. Having people implement methods that would cost them their own jobs is a tough sell.
What do you think? Are there easy ways to get government minimizing technology implemented?
