Liberals for Responsible Government

One of the no chance gubernatorial candidates here had an interesting idea as part of his campaign.

“To pursue our progressive agenda, people have to have trust in our government.”

Basically the idea is that if progressives aka liberals want voters to vote for their big government agenda, liberals need to make sure that government works well by addressing corruption and inefficiency as major issues. It is rather unusual to hear a liberal speak to this. Generally government corruption and/or inefficiency is a libertarian or conservative theme. But it does make logical sense. If government corruption and inefficiency is reduced, voters will have less incentive to vote for a antigovernment agenda. (Of course there are still other reasons for them to vote against big government such as government intrusiveness/privacy concerns, tax rate concerns etc. But still it does reduce the impact 2 of the major items on the why not to vote for bigger government list.)

It will be interesting to see if any real candidates pick up the idea. I haven't seen it as a major liberal theme. Generally the liberal theme is government is good and is here to help you. I haven't previously seen any liberals saying - we will FIX government so that you the voter will believe it is good.

Ummm, might be a bit unusual in the US, but it happens here all the time. That applies to all parties, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Labour, SNP and even UKIP.

It was a major theme in the independence referendum that Westminster was regarded as broken. The SNP declared it didn't represent the interests of the whole of the UK, only big business, London and the South East as well as the "Metropolitan Elite" etc, etc, etc.

UKIP bang away with a similar message, just adding the EU and immigrants to the mix.

It's not exactly accurate, but with enough truth in it to sting "the Establishment" into considering decentralising power away from Westminster, posture on Europe and make platitudes about immigration.

Interesting times in UK politics.

Mike.

We have some internal disputes within the parties when subgroups have conflicting goals, the labor unions and the greens (both part of the Democrat party) have been fighting each other a great deal lately for obvious reasons. But one of the things that impressed me about this person was that he essentially said Big government is the solution to all of our problems, therefore those of us who want big government must make it as effective as humanly possible. I haven't heard that sort of thing from many other politicians. The greens for example don't say responsible environmental policy will fix all of our problems therefore we have the responsibility to make sure that our environmental policy is effective in fixing environmental problems. No they routinely support policies that sound good but are minimally effective. The various other factions tend to do the same thing and we wind up with mountains of government programs, regulations etc that are not particularly effective but create a significant compliance burden for all involved. I suppose one thing that impressed me was that he wasn't saying the other guy is wrong and the other guy's policies are broken, he was saying my solution needs to be fixed.