Well, before we wade into mindkilling territory, let me set the stage and we'll see if you find the framework reasonable.
Government power is multidimensional. It's very common to wish for more government power in one area but less in another area. Therefore government power in aggregate is a very crude metric. However if you try to imagine government power as an n-dimensional body in a high-dimensional space, you can think of the volume of that n-dimensional body as total government power and that gives you a handle on what that means.
Government power, generally speaking, has costs and benefits. Few people prefer either of the two endpoints -- complete totalitarianism or stateless anarchy. Most arguments are about which trade-offs are advantageous and about where the optimal point on the axis is located. To talk about optimality you need a yardstick. That yardstick is people's value system. Since people have different value systems, different people will prefer different optimal points. If you consider the whole population you can (theoretically) build a preference distribution and interpret one of its centrality measures (e.g. mean, median, or mode) as the "optimal" optimal point, but that needs additional assumptions and gets rather convoluted rather fast.
There are multiple complicating factors in play here. Let me briefly list two.
First, the population's preferences do not arise spontaneously in a pure and sincere manner. They are a function of local culture and the current memeplex, for example (see the Overton window), and are rather easily manipulated. Manipulating the political sentiments of the population is a time-honored and commonplace activity, you can assume by default that it is happening. There are multiple forces attempting the manipulation, of course, with different goals, so the balance is fluid and uncertain. Consider the ideas of "manufacturing consent" or the concept of "engines of consent" -- these ideas were put forward by such diverse people as, say, Chomsky and neoreactionaries.
Second, the government, as an organization, has its own incentives, desires, and goals. The primary among them is to survive, then to grow which generally means become more powerful. Governments rarely contract (willingly), most of the time they expand. This means that without a countervailing force governments will "naturally" grow too big and too powerful past that optimal point mentioned above. Historically that has been dealt with by military conquests, revolutions, and internal coups, but the world has been quite stable lately...
I'll stop before this becomes a wall of text, but does all of the above look reasonable to you?
All of it looks reasonable to me apart from the last paragraph. I can see times when governments do willingly contract. There are often candidates who campaign on a platform of tax cuts, the UK had one in power from 1979-1990 and the US had one in power from 2001-2009.
Tax cuts necessarily require eventual reductions in government spending and thus the power of government, agreed?
[Originally posted to my personal blog, reposted here with edits.]
Introduction
Something Impossible
The Well-Functioning Gear
Recursive Heroic Responsibility
Heroic responsibility for average humans under average conditions
I can predict at least one thing that people will say in the comments, because I've heard it hundreds of times–that Swimmer963 is a clear example of someone who should leave nursing, take the meta-level responsibility, and do something higher impact for the usual. Because she's smart. Because she's rational. Whatever.
Fine. This post isn't about me. Whether I like it or not, the concept of heroic responsibility is now a part of my value system, and I probably am going to leave nursing.
But what about the other nurses on my unit, the ones who are competent and motivated and curious and really care? Would familiarity with the concept of heroic responsibility help or hinder them in their work? Honestly, I predict that they would feel alienated, that they would assume I held a low opinion of them (which I don't, and I really don't want them to think that I do), and that they would flinch away and go back to the things that they were doing anyway, the role where they were comfortable–or that, if they did accept it, it would cause them to burn out. So as a consequentialist, I'm not going to tell them.
And yeah, that bothers me. Because I'm not a special snowflake. Because I want to live in a world where rationality helps everyone. Because I feel like the reason they would react that was isn't because of anything about them as people, or because heroic responsibility is a bad thing, but because I'm not able to communicate to them what I mean. Maybe stupid reasons. Still bothers me.