How to know government is too big...

"I am sovereign" is a constitution that belongs to every human being on this planet and is the only moral constitution. In essence: there is no logic to justify one human being ruling over another and, as such, every human on the planet is sovereign.

A lot of people struggle with the concept of individual sovereignty (i.e anarchy). I know I sure did up until a couple of years ago. Many people believe some form of government is needed. For those people I offer the following guideline on how you know when your government is too big:

Every person who receives a payment from the government should be able to name (e.g. "John Smith", "Alice Jones", etc.) every person that contributed to the payment (i.e. the recipient should be able to name all the taxpayers). If they can't then the government is too big and should be dissolved.

I think it is much harder for government to become unwieldy when the recipients of government largess personally know all the taxpayers. Consider this in contrast to the very vague and anonymous terms of large government: "rich", "middle-class", "poor", "corporations", "wealthy". Who are these people? Why is it OK to take their money? It's not, but it seems OK since people don't know them personally. If you ask Bill if it is OK to take his neighbor Sam's money he will probably answer no. But ask him about taxing the rich or middle-class and he'll come up with some scheme that he thinks is acceptable.