There’s a strange phenomenon that I’ve observed, where believers in ‘big government’ seem to forget that the position of Prime Minister, or in the US the position of President, changes hands on a semi-regular basis. This forgetfulness leads people to advocate for increased powers for government when ‘their’ party is in, and completely forget that pretty soon that power will be in the hands of the opposition.
Whenever someone says the government should have more power, ask them how they would feel if that increased power were in the hands of their least-favorite politician. In Australia that tends to mean asking “What if Tony Abbott had been able to do that?” or “John Howard would have loved that.” That tends to get people thinking twice pretty quickly.
We’re having a perfect object lesson in this right now in the US. It’s as if the people who supported G.W. Bush and / or B. Obama as they gathered ever more power to the office of the president never thought that pretty soon that power would be in the hands of someone else… maybe even *shock horror* the hands of D. Trump.
This is a teaching moment. This is a moment where Libertarians and freedom lovers can draw the link between government overreach and… well… everyone’s favorite bogey-man, Trump!
The idea of Donald Trump is only terrifying to these people because of the amount of power the office of the President of the United States has been able to gather over the preceding decades. And if they’d listened to those ‘crazy libertarians’ then maybe, just maybe, there would be less to fear today.
Use this moment. Press the point whenever and wherever you see people complaining about Trump having too much power to do whatever he wants. Trump did not get this power when he became President, but rather he got it when Obama was allowed to claim it, when Bush II claimed it, when Clinton claimed it, and so on… and he got it because not enough people pushed back when ‘their guy’ was in the office.
Learn, and teach.
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Will anybody ever learn?
There already is a perfectly scary example of what happens when a madman is allowed to grab excessive powers in a nominal democracy: Germany, 80 years ago .
And the irony is, that he is now used as a bogey-man especially by the most ardent proponents of intrusive paternalistic “regulations”. Either as a pretext “to prevent it from ever happening again”. Or as a Godwin cudgel to smash any opposing voices. And don’t ever dare to point out that their propaganda style is very reminiscent of that era. Then you get lots of “friendly fire”. Because that would be insensitive to the victims of that madman.
Learn from history?
Wishful thinking!