Question

This is basically about goverment. And none of it makes sense to me. When people complain about "big government," they are referring to the a. size and power of the federal bureaucracy

b. size and power of the Senate

c. oversight activities of the president

d. oversight activities of the judiciary

Answer 1

It's not c

Answer 2

Its not A

Answer 3

whys that?

Answer 4

i think D....

Answer 5

Wait a second.. I didnt mean A, i meant B. :P

Answer 6

so A could be a possibility?

Answer 7

Yes, A is a big possibility, because the bureaucracy can be said to lack in accountability.

Answer 8

Your right, it's D.

Answer 9

A and D are both possible. There are more than 2 million people who work for the Federal Government, making decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The President in theory is the only one who supervises all of them. What are the chances that he is doing that perfectly? That not one of those teeming bureaucrats is making a bad, cruel or even illegal judgment. and if he does, the President will find out and fix it? Pretty much zip. You might as well hope, as a citizen of Rome in 100 AD, that if a local legion commander robs you that the Emperor a thousand miles away will find out and fix it.

That doesn't matter quite so much if the Federal government comes into your life only rarely, because any mistakes will be doubly rare. But if the Federal government rummages around in your life every day, in almost everything you do, it's a different story. It's as if, as a kid, you didn't have to obey just your parents, who know you well, but also half a dozen Official Parents off in a Washington office, who wouldn't know you aside from some facts on a piece of paper in front of them (which may or may not be accurate, because what motivation does anyone have to make sure they are?), who would change at random intervals, and whose decisions could not easily be appealed. Sound like fun?

D is also possible, because it involves judges making a huge number of decisions about peoples' lives -- what they can and can't do, what things they may have done are legal or illegal -- which makes sense, but unfortunately not when you have the enormous quantity of law we have, and where that law doesn't just touch on simple obvious things, like whether you can kill someone or bulldoze the last redwood in a forest, but really obscure and complicated stuff, like precisely how close to a stream you can build a house, or whether you can sell a lightbulb of a certain type, or exactly what kind of hours you can ask your gardener to work, how you have to keep the books when you run a falafel stand, what you can and cannot say when a person asks you for a letter of recommendation, and on and on. There are so many regulations and rules and laws buried in thousands of pages of law books, and written in very complex language, that is almost impossible for an ordinary person, who has neither the time nor wish to study the law intensely for five years, to just act reasonably and conscientiously and be certain he is not breaking any of it.

In both cases, however, the difficulty starts with Congress, which strangely enough isn't mentioned in your answer choices. The essential difficulty is that Congress paradoxically passes far too much law -- making it very difficult for an ordinarily careful person to stay on the right side of it -- and yet passes law that is not carefully thought out, which is often inconsisent, vague, or illogical. This forces bureaucrats to interpret the law, to decide what it actually means in a specific case. If people disagree, some of them will file lawsuits, and then you have judges who have to decide what the law actually means. If the law is sufficiently murky, judges and bureaucrats will disagree, and even judges and judges, and some cases may have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. It's not only a tremendous burden on people, but a tremendous waste of social resources.

The people who despise big government think the essence of the problem is the "There Oughta Be A Law" mentality, that thinks a law is a better solution than just plain human give and take. Imagine growing up in a family with two or three brothers and sisters. Now imagine that EVERY SINGLE TIME you and one of them had some disagreement -- over a toy, over what to watch on the TV, or who gets to sit where at the table, or how you can express disagreement -- your parents made a rule about what should happen, instead of just talking things over with you, or asking you to talk things over with your brother and sister, and coming up with some mutually agreeable solution.

So you begin by having obvious and sensible rules:

(1) No hitting to solve disagreements. No calling names.

(2) Take turns with toys neither of you own. Respect each other's property.

But after a while it gets a little complex:

(1) Jane sits at the left of mom at dinner on Mondays and Tuesdays, but Jack does on Wednesdays and alternate Thursdays, unless he's at soccer practice, in which case Jane takes his turn and gives up her next turn to him, unless her next turn happens to fall on her birthday...

And sooner or later it becomes essentially impossible to remember all the rules, and you feel trapped in some horrible mindless machine. You'd be saying, geez, can't we just TALK about this some time? I'm sure me and Jack could figure out what we both want, and cut a deal that works for us.

That's the point of view of people who dislike big government. They prefer that people work out their differences directly, by talking to each other, and not by having rules handed down to them from Washington.

Answer 10

Great input Carl!

Answer 11

It is A. size and power of the federal bureaucracy