Perhaps I'm out of step with the norms here, but I've always understood "big government vs. small government" to be about the question of how much stuff the government should be administering. I think even most of the "big government" folks would agree that you want that government to be efficient (unless, y'know, it's your job that might get eliminated :-) ).
The problem there is that most people who invoke "small government" do so terribly insincerely -- nowadays, it's usually code for "the government should stop doing this thing I don't approve of". It's a perrennial tactic of the hard right these days, using the rhetoric of genuine Goldwater-school conservatism to accomplish very different goals.
Really, "small government" has mostly passed its prime as an organizing meme politically. It made sense when it was being contrasted with a relatively extreme 70s-Democrat statism, but only the most utterly hardcore leftists espouse that sort of thing nowadays. So without something real to balance against, the "small government" movement has largely been subverted. You have to read the code carefully.
To be fair, there are people are genuinely believe in Small Government Dammit. But they're almost all hardcore Libertarians at this point, not Republicans, and they're a fairly small fraction of the people using the rhetoric...
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Really, "small government" has mostly passed its prime as an organizing meme politically. It made sense when it was being contrasted with a relatively extreme 70s-Democrat statism, but only the most utterly hardcore leftists espouse that sort of thing nowadays. So without something real to balance against, the "small government" movement has largely been subverted. You have to read the code carefully.
To be fair, there are people are genuinely believe in Small Government Dammit. But they're almost all hardcore Libertarians at this point, not Republicans, and they're a fairly small fraction of the people using the rhetoric...