A hugely important, but often overlooked, advantage of the small (&strong) state political philosophy, intellectually supported among others by the Austrian School, is its ability to nip in the bud any nonsensical and poisonous blame game that pop politics thrives on.
The political blame game is the flip-side of the 'Government Has To Do Something About This!' Fallacy which foolishly urges governments hastily to think of anything (usually: opinion polls), step in and spend money where and when they have no idea, no means and no business.
Being a consequence of that Action Fallacy, the political blame game is at the same time its catalyst and the resulting vicious circle can derail any political system; and it often has. It possesses, by definition, a particularly lethal potential in democracies.
The small-state philosophy - a hard beast to rear, as it takes a greater intellectual effort to advocate inaction than it does to clamour for action - allows the government to cut short a line on which it could otherwise get easily hooked and relieves the citizens of one of the greatest political threats: their government's action.
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From Hansard, 2nd November 2020:
Mr John Populist (Marginalseatville) (Lab) "Can the Right Honourable Gentleman explain why the Government allowed for the situation to arise in the first place, why it didn't intervene to stop it and why it is doing nothing at the moment to deal with its consequences?"
[half the House, in line with the Public Choice theory]"Yeah, yeah!"
The Secretary of State for Little (Mr Efficient)"No. Mr Speaker, I refuse to discuss this. Let the Honourable Member for Marginalseatville talk to the invisible hand!"
Can you see the hand? But it achieved a lot. (An outline of a human hand dated 27,000 BC, from the Cosquer Cave, France)
