Limited Government

3 Key excerpts on "Limited Government"

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  Liberalism and the Limits of Power

  • J. Williams(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  On the other hand, liberals also have been acutely sensitive to the dan- gers that majoritarian rule poses to the rights of individuals, particularly those in the minority. This abiding ambivalence about democracy is reflected in U.S. political culture, where Americans typically exalt the virtues of democracy even while disparaging the incompetence of their fellow citizens. 8 For liberal philosophers, the ideal of Limited Government serves to mediate the fundamental tension between liberalism and democracy. Limited Government stands for the idea of democracy enabled, but always contained.As I discuss in the subsequent two chapters, twentieth-century Limited Government in Liberal Tradition 7 liberal theorists have regarded it as axiomatic that a fixed and firm boundary be drawn to distinguish the realm of public authority from the domain of private life, thereby curtailing the ability of democratically accountable legislatures to authorize incursions against individual liberties. In the words of political theorist Will Kymlicka,“Liberalism expresses its commitment to modern liberty by sharply separating the public power of the state from the private relationships of civil society, and by setting strict limits on the state’s ability to intervene in private life” (emphasis added). 9 As exemplified in Kymlicka’s description, liberal theorists typically por- tray the social world in terms of a division of spheres, zones, or realms, extolling the importance of “sharp separations,” “strict limits,” or what Isaiah Berlin famously refers to as the “frontier” beyond which public authority may never reach. Insisting on the need to “draw the line” and “fix the limit,” liberals defend the public/private divide as the central axis along which to divide social geography.

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  Power and Policy

  Lessons for Leaders in Government and Business

  • Wesley B. Truitt(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  5 Limitations on Power Governments and corporations, regardless of how large, have limitations on their power. Limits are imposed by the availability of resources—financial, material, human, and so forth. And in the case of democracies a limit is imposed by the willingness of the governed to accept government’s decisions to allocate and concentrate resources in pursuit of its particular policy objectives, thereby denying their use for competing purposes. Resources are never unlimited. At a more fundamental level, limits on the power of government have stemmed from competing institutions and from society itself. The most powerful office in the world is the U.S. presidency, uniquely combining as it does the roles of head of government and head of state. It is important to understand limitations that have been placed on that office and how they have been eroded, especially in times of economic crisis and war. LIMITATIONS ON THE POWER OF THE STATE What are the restraints on governmental power? Zbigniew Brzezinski, a leading expert on Soviet totalitarianism, organizes restraints on political power in three categories, all of which are present in any constitutional so- ciety. (1) There are direct restraints, expressed through conventions established by the society to limit power, such as England’s Magna Charta, the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, and ‘‘the broad con- sensus of tradition that rules out certain types of conduct, such as the use of violence.’’ (2) The indirect restraints ‘‘stem from the pluralistic

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  Beyond the New Right

  • John Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Limited Government A positive agenda Economic Policy for a Free Society

  none of the precious ‘freedoms’ which our generation has inherited can be extended, or even maintained, apart from an essential freedom of enterprise – apart from a genuine ‘division of labour’ between competitive and political controls.

  (Henry Simon)1

  The proper extent of the activity and authority of government is the chief question in political philosophy. The object of these reflections, nevertheless, is not to try to specify, once and for all, the appropriate functions of government and the limits of its authority. There are good sceptical reasons – which I shall invoke when I consider recent attempts to fix the frontiers of the state by reference to a set of abstract principles – for supposing that that object cannot be achieved. My purpose here is the humbler one of addressing the role of government in Britain today and in other, similar countries. Since I deploy arguments and considerations which ought to be accepted by anyone who cares for individual liberty, my reflections are intended to have application well beyond the present circumstances in Britain, but I harbour no aspiration of universality for them. This is intended to be a study in theory and policy, not primarily in political philosophy.

  I shall not rehearse my arguments here, but instead simply summarise my conclusions. The scope of government activity in Britain remains vastly overextended. The autonomous institutions of civil society are today threatened by an invasive state whose size and arbitrary power have not substantially diminished, and in important respects have indeed been enhanced, after over a decade of rule by a Conservative administration avowedly dedicated to whittling down government to its most indispensable functions. In recent years, the project of confining government to the task of assuring for individuals and enterprises a stable legal and monetary framework within which they may plan their own activities has been abandoned, and there has been a return to ‘stop-go’ policies of macro-economic management, with government conceiving itself as the sponsor or author of enterprise. According to most measures, the overall burden of taxation has not diminished but rather increased, and public expenditure as a fraction of national income has fallen, if at all, only slightly. It is, again, a depressing fact that, despite efforts to diminish the culture of dependency in Britain, the poorer half of the population still receives nearly half of its income from government. Most ominously, a tendency to increasing centralisation has become evident in many aspects of policy, most particularly in those concerning education, with substantial discretionary powers being appropriated by Ministers. As the Economist noted recently: Tar from reducing the role of the central state, Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s government has extended it…. Mr Kenneth Baker acquired 415 new powers when the Education Reform Act became law in July…. Mrs Thatcher’s government has also broken all records in the quantity of legislation.’2 There has also been an explosion of secondary legislation, with the first half of 1987 seeing as many pages of statutory instruments (allowing for subsequent ministerial orders) as the whole of 1959. Further, as the Economist went on to observe: ‘Over the past two years the civil service has started to grow again. Its numbers are still higher than they were under Mr Edward Heath’s Tory government of the early 1970s…. The numbers working for quangos have also started to rise. Recent and prospective legislation could make things worse. The new education bill has created four big new quangos, covering the national curriculum, school examinations and the financing of universities and polytechnics. The water-privatisation bill will set up an even bigger one, a national rivers authority employing up to 10,000 staff.’3

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