There’s an interesting back‐and‐forth between Dan Foster at National Review and Ezra Klein at the Washington Post over whether there’s a symmetry between libertarian (or conservative) preference for smaller government and progressive advocacy for a larger or more active one. Ezra wants to maintain that the former is “philosophical”—one might use the more loaded “ideological”—in a way that the latter is not. And his argument has some intuitive appeal, but I think ultimately misfires:
But like a lot of people, I actually don’t have an abstract preference for either bigger government or smaller government. 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. 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.
Now, this much I take to be true: Ezra and other progressives, talk show rhetoric notwithstanding, don’t have some abstract desire to increase the size and power of government independently of particular functions they want government to serve. But that doesn’t mean his contrast between his “practical preference” for larger government “where it seems to make sense” and the “philosophical preference for small goverment” will fly. As long as we’re invoking philosophy, it may be useful to deploy the hoary distinction ethicists often make between teleological and deontological principles—very crudely, the distinction between principles that specify ends or goals, and principles that specify rules that constrain our pursuit of ends or goals.