To put it a little differently:
The larger the government, the more burden it puts on the economy, which hinders economic growth and prosperity.
To help you understand this point, let me present to you an analogy.
The Backpack Analogy
Imagine that there is a person walking down a path with a backpack on their back. The person walking down the path represents the economy. The path itself represents economic progress and growth. The faster the person walks, the faster the economic progress and growth. The backpack represents the government and the public sector tied to the government, and the weight, the burden, it puts on the economy and its potential growth.
Think about the backpack – it, at first, contains the basic supplies that the metaphorical person needs to keep walking down the path, and nothing more. Over time, though, the backpack gets filled with more and more things, things which the person thinks they need, but really don’t. At first, the backpack is light, which makes it easy for the person to walk down the road at a fast pace. Over time, though, the backpack gets heavier and heavier, slowing down the person more and more. If not careful, the backpack could get so large and heavy that the person can’t keep walking anymore. If you make the backpack even larger and heavier than that, the person gets to the point where they won’t be able to handle the weight any longer and they collapse.
In this analogy, the faster the person walks down the path, the faster the economic progress and growth. The slower the person walks, the slower the economic progress and growth. The weight of the backpack, which represents the burden of the government and the public sector on the economy, can determine how fast or slow economic growth is.
If the person collapses in this analogy, that represents economic collapse or an economic depression. The excessive burden of the government on the shoulders of the economy, in the form of excessively high taxes, can actually lead to a collapse of our economy, and the destruction of our well-being and prosperity.
Now, if the person in the analogy collapses, what do you think is the best way to get them back on their feet so they can keep moving again? The fastest way, if there’s any common sense in play here, is to remove most of the stuff in the backpack that is causing all of the excessive weight that caused the person to collapse in the first place – that way, the backpack becomes light again and the person can quickly get back on their feet. Of course, the person needs the backpack and its basic supplies since they will be needed as he walks down the road. Hopefully by this time the person realizes that he’s packed way too much stuff into his backpack that he really doesn’t need, and that all that extra stuff did was weigh him down and hinder his progress down the road, so he decides to learn from his mistake and make sure he doesn’t let his backpack get too heavy again, lest he collapses again.
Do you know what would be even better? If this person, with the backpack, learned from other’s mistakes. If he saw other people collapse under the weight of their backpacks (representing other nations), he could learn from their mistakes, which was having too heavy of a backpack, and by learning from them, he doesn’t have to repeat that same mistake.
All too often, though, experts come up, after the person collapses, and explain to him that, in their expert opinions (apparently devoid of any common sense), the best way for him to get back on his feet is to keep the backpack on, and put even more weight into it. Question: Do you think that this approach would work? Absolutely not! It never has. This was the approach that former president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, took in the 1930’s during our Great Depression. Many people mistakenly think he was a great leader that guided the United States through the Great Depression, and that we couldn’t have done it without him; in reality his policies and programs put such a burden on the economy that it kept it from getting back on its feet, and doubled or tripled the length of our Great Depression, causing the amount of pain and suffering endured by Americans to greatly increase.
There’s one more element to consider – imagine the person isn’t weak, but has become very strong. Because he’s strong, he can handle heavier burdens in his backpack than people who aren’t as strong, but still the weight of the backpack slows him down. Maybe he doesn’t collapse like weaker people (representing nations with weaker economies that go down the socialist-big-government route), but still he’s walking much slower than he would have had his backpack been much lighter.
In this analogy, the size of the government and the public sector, if allowed to grow and grow, represents more and more of a burden on economic growth and progress. The smaller the burden, the faster the economic progress and growth; the larger the burden, the slower the economic growth and progress in that country. This is one of the reasons why it would benefit us to have a limited size of government and government programs, including social welfare programs.
If we minimize the size of our government, we minimize the burden on our economic growth, and thus cause our prosperity as a nation, and as people in that nation, to be maximized.
Lesson learned:
Don’t put too much burden on the private sector of the economy by weighing it down with too much government, and the high taxes needed to operate that big government, because it actually hinders economic growth, and widespread prosperity.
