Rick Herrick Central - Hi there.

Update Below: Will Wilkinson addresses Dylan Matthews's point about Hayek's support for social insurance and safety nets.

In this article on Bill Kristol's recent outreach to tea-party activists, James Poulos makes a declaration about how liberals and progressives view the size of government:

For progressives, Hamiltonian vigor and Madisonian virtue alike are too narrow to be truly good or great. Rather than being merely powerful, government and business must be big -- the better to work in permanent 'partnership' for the perfection of public virtue.

This is mistaken.  As Ezra Klein notes here, the size of government is not a goal in and of itself:

I actually don't have an abstract preference for either bigger government or smaller government... A lot of conservatives believe, I think, that their philosophical preference for small government is counterbalanced by other people's philosophical preference for big government. But that's not true: Their philosophical preference for small government is counterbalanced by other people's practical preference for larger government in certain areas where it seems to make sense.

Italics mine.  Because that's the crux.  Conservatives want to reduce the size of the government as an end in itself.  The costs of this reduction--a weak social safety net, reduced federal regulatory powers, inconsistent educational standards across the country--are all side effects that are 1) acceptable costs for the ultimate goal, a mostly government-free society, and/or 2) effects that will be mitigated once we have fully transitioned to the frictionless society free of government interference and regulated only by societal conventions and personal morality.

I'm not trying to be snarky with the above summary, but that is the basic point: once government interference is removed, society will regulate itself.

Obviously I and people to the left of center disagree with this particular point and see areas where government can and should play an important role (and it doesn't even take being left of center, as the examples of Hayek and Adam Smith show).  But as Klein notes, there are plenty of places where liberals are just fine with the size of government being small or non-existent:

If we made the Defense Department a lot smaller, or reformed the health-care system so that we were getting a deal more akin to European countries, or got the federal government out of farm subsidies, that would be fine with me, even as the government would shrink.

The real point of contention is that liberals sometimes believe that certain issues in society are best dealt with or mitigated by or coordinated through government action, while conservatives or libertarians are much less likely to agree that these problems are worth the cost of more government, higher taxes, higher regulatory burdens, etc. (I say "much less likely" because it's rare to find someone with any seriousness who believes that government should never be involved and/or shouldn't exist).

I know many "movement conservatives" will disagree with this, but they're wrong.  It does, however, explain how people extrapolate all the way to liberals wanting to use the jack boot of state power to repress the population (although this concern is usually in relation to economic interests; there's little concern for workers' rights and the like outside of 2nd Amendment issues): once you believe that the point of liberalism or progressivism is to increase the size and power of the state as an end in itself, you have to wonder why do they want to do that?  And the obvious answer is control of society.  However, once you accept the fact that liberals are not compelled by the size of government inherently, but are interested in solving societal problems (regardless of whether or not you agree that their approach is the proper way to solve those problems), then that demonization can and should be set aside.  Because frankly I'm sick of it.

Update: Will Wilkinson addresses the issue Dylan Matthews raised about Hayek's support for social insurance and safety nets.  It doesn't really matter, the point remains: Hayek is often presented as almost a caricature of his actual philosophy, which, while obviously oriented towards relying almost solely free-market mechanisms for regulation of the economy and society, still contains elements of social orientation that are not typically considered as part of the Hayek-ian philosophy.  Wilkinson then goes on to describe how Hayek would not approve of PPACA, but Matthews wasn't contending that Hayek was a closet supporter of socialized medicine, but that even Hayek himself saw the need to mitigate at least the outlying effects and societal costs of the unrestricted free market.

It is even easier, of course, to counter the caricatured image of Adam Smith as relying solely upon the "invisible hand," with his own words.