Matthew, you make me revise my thoughts on the youth of today.

The fact that one so young can talk such sense does my heart good. Keep up the great work.

Even some of the agreeing posts are still short of the truth however, particularly with health care.

We did not have public health in NSW in the 50s, but as the average wage earner paid only 7.5% tax, & medical/hospital benefits were cheep, everyone was better off, with much more of their earnings to support themselves.

About the most inefficient way to pay my doctor’s bill, is to pay some bureaucrat to take money out of my pay, & another to part pay my doctor, leaving me to pay the balance.

Matthew, I wish you joy, & hope you can draw enough support to make some headway in reducing government, but I have some worries.

I think we may now be at one of those tipping points, so loved by the global warming brigade. We now have so many public servants that, if they detect a threat to their comfort & unite, they can actually control the result of elections in a very large number of seats. I believe our Labor governments have helped this to happen, & coalition governments have been running scared of upsetting them, & loosing too many seats.

We can take heart perhaps, by the recent results in the UK, where their Labor government had for some time, pushed up the public sector employment to help control unemployment, & maximise their vote. That they lost gives some hope.

With their new government cutting many gravey train jobs it will be interesting to see the public response.

As Gerald Ford said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." But the converse isn't true. A government big enough to take everything you have doesn't need to be big enough to give you everything you want. It only needs to be big enough to hire a carload of armed thugs to break down your door and take you away. If it weren't big enough to do that, it wouldn't be a government at all.

That's why the Right-Wing mantra that smaller government means greater freedom is always merely asserted and never supported by rational argument. It is actually based on the deliberate and malicious confusion between the how big the government is, and what the government is constitutionally allowed to do. Young Mr Lesh has swallowed it hook, line and sinker, and regurgitated it to perfection. In so doing, he has undoubtedly endeared himself to his right-wing mentors and assured himself a long and lucrative career.

In truth, freedom consists not in limiting the size of government, but in limiting the ways in which the government is allowed to throw its weight around. (If that *in turn* tends to limit the size of government, so be it.) But anyone who proposes limits on what the government is allowed to do is immediately denounced by the Right as an enemy of the people and a defender of an unaccountable, out-of-control judiciary. (Explanatory note: if you want to attack independence, you call it unaccountability; if you want to defend unaccountability, you call it independence.)

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"Every single day government borrows a 100 million dollars," says Mr Lesh. That's about a sixth of what the private sector borrows to keep housing prices pumped up -- not to build new houses, just to inflate the value of the existing stock and the underlying land to keep 30% of people locked out of home ownership. And anyone who advocates tax reforms that would direct more borrowing towards new construction, so that people can more easily afford housing, is denounced by the Right as another defender of big, property-confiscating, freedom-destroying government. But when the bubble caused by the lack of such policies eventually bursts, the Right has no objection to bailing out the lenders at taxpayers' expense.

The right loves to proclaim that Hong Kong has "little or no natural resources," conveniently forgetting the most valuable natural resources of all: land and space, which together account for much of what are called "property values". The smaller the land area into which an industrial economy is crammed, the greater the value of that land and space per unit area area and per unit volume, and the more obvious the opportunity to tax property values rather than productive activity. Hong Kong indeed has a high reliance on recurrent property taxes, hence a low reliance on income tax. But the Right never points out that aspect of Hong Kong's success, because the Right's business model consists in capturing value created by other people's work and enterprise -- e.g. the locational value of land and space.

"In a democratic society," says Mr Lesh, "power should be with the people not with the government."

Never mind that power is wielded by private cartelists under the guise of landed property, and by private monopolists under the guise of intellectual property. Never mind that such property rights, together with their maximalist interpretations, are creatures of government. Because the Right never had a problem with big government as long as it works for the rich against the poor, for the strong against the weak, for those who don't need the government against those who do.

Ahem... Of course the 2nd sentence in my 2nd paragraph should read: "It is actually based on the deliberate and malicious confusion between how big the government is, and what the government is constitutionally allowed to do."

The free market has sucked the life out of our comunities on the more local levels of society, so that now we all get in our cars to drive to work for some privately owned company. We don't talk to our neighbours and our neighbourhoods and villages are economic vacuums.

Rather then pursuing a free market, I suggest that we would be better off encouraging interdependence and local self-reliance within our societies; on the larger scale and the small. Encouraging people to buy locally is central to this.

Economic growth is not a good measure of progress. Let us say that we reach the point where we have to employ a huge fleet of earthmoving equiptment to build dykes to keep out rising sea levels: The economy will be growing all the way, but all we are spending our money on is mitigating against the negative effects caused by the previous activities of unrestrained industry. - uneconomic growth - as Herman Daly says. The vacuous nature of our communities is another example of the negative results of the free market/economic growth mantra.

A well written article I thought, especially for one so young, but as grputland pointed out, all you have done is "swallowed.......the right wing mantra..... hook, line and sinker, and regurgitated it to perfection."

This article is written by a 17 year old school kid, and it shows. It almost looks like an essay one would show to their teacher to get a minimum grade- complete with a simplified view of the world divided between "Tea Party" people and a mismash of liberals, socialists and hippies; and governance being nothing more than being "Bigger" and more expensive and more commie-like, vs "Smaller" and cheaper and more freedom-like.

"Every single year government grows by two percent; government will be bigger tomorrow then ever before"
Something would be bigger if it grows- Outstanding!

"Government borrows 100Mil a day"- what, every government? Because memory serves that the Liberal Party managed to maintain funding for public services (no thanks to NSW Labor trying hard to sabotage them) while taking the Australian public sector OUT of debt and making a surplus.

Of course, it's easier to pretend that "big government" immediately corresponds to communism (China).

The bottom line is that "Big government" is a stupid term that simplifies the various functions a government to how much it costs- which is why the Tea Party movement is overwhelmingly composed of illiterate uneducated rednecks with limited perceptive skills..

I am now taking note of anyone that was actually impressed by this article (how OLO would even pick it), and memorizing who I would not have to take seriously.