One Day the Whole World Will Be Carpeted and Republicans Will Do the Cleaning

Interestingly, while filling in for Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf realizes that Matt Yglesias doesn't necessarily want to grow government just for the sake of growing government. Instead, it's possible those who do not consider themselves Republican and/or conservative are actually not liberal hippies that stroke off daily to thoughts of Big Government. 

This is a topic I talk about frequently perhaps not necessarily on the blog.  A few weeks ago I wrote that the size of government is irrelevant.  People care more about efficiency than about size.  On a political level, those that are left of center tend to care more about policy achieving a desired result than about the size of government.  And those on the right tend to care more about how policy affects the size of government than about about a desired result from the policy.

The problem with all that is none of it is true.  People on the left really don't care about government growing or shrinking.  Whereas people on the right merely only want to talk about shrinking government.  Steve Benen says it like this.  "The liberal worldview is not about necessarily increasing the size of government or raising taxes; those mechanisms are only valuable insofar as they reach the desired end-point. For the right, it's the other way around -- the ideological goal is the desired end-point."   Except for the fact that the right has never achieved their desired goal, or even come close to shrinking government, I'd say Steve is about right.

Then we have to consider it's not even accurate to claim people on the right want to shrink government as an ideology.  If they do subscribe to such ideology, they've never once governed that way.  In fact, when given ample opportunity to govern, they did nothing but enormously grow government.  Whereas on the left, policy objectives have both shrunk government and grown government proving the left cannot possibly be labeled as Big Government.