A conservative friend of mine likes to always include the concept of “Big Government” in any political discussion; it’s probably his touchstone and may be in his campaign literature (he’s run unsuccessfully for the state House a couple of times). That led me to wonder how the size of government correlates – or should hypothetically correlate – to the size of the population.
But that’s a context-less question, and we know that leads to bad answers, so let’s add a minimal but realistic context – a population in a country with static boundaries.
Let’s set up an analogy. Think of the game Tetris, which is the game where you have a box and an assortment of differently shaped objects are falling from the sky; it’s your task to fit in as many objects in the box as possible. During the early stages of the game – when the population of objects is low – there’s little management necessary. But as the box starts to fill up, more and more work is necessary until the player is overwhelmed and the game ends with your failure.
Similarly, when a country is mostly empty, the actions of the individual only have a local importance, and the Big Government at the national capitol can occupy itself most properly with international affairs, such as foreign invaders and that sort of thing, leaving the citizens mostly alone.
But – and assuming human life is considered to have a certain high value in and of itself, which I think is necessary simply to keep society stable – as the population grows, the actions of the aggregate individuals begin to interact with the supporting ecology in a substantial manner. And, as the ecology tends to diffuse the effects of these activities through its natural processes, such as rivers and air circulation, the effects build as the “box” fills up. For example, consider a coal-fired power plant on the East Coast, spreading its mercury-laced soot to the West Coast via air currents.
A similar argument can be made concerning the natural conflict of individual civil rights and where they end – one’s “nose” tends to get shorter and shorter[1]. Crowding closer and closer, our “rights” impact other’s more and more. A vivid example is the right to not accept vaccinations. The greater the population density, the less this “right” can be accepted, as it causes epidemics[2].
Assuming current societal norms, I think that as we near our box boundaries in terms of population, the larger government must become larger to keep the societal piece – and quite possibly at a pace that is greater than our approach to our box limits. It becomes a self-reinforcing loop.
And what happens when the box is full? Rats start eating each other, I’ve read.
1Referring to the old saying, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” The source appears to be uncertain.
2This, of course, assumes epidemics are bad. I fear I stray out of the mainstream, because I’m willing to consider that an open question in the context of overpopulation, even though its benefits in the improvement of the human condition are obvious and beyond argument. The conundrum is obvious (and worth a novel or two). It occurs to me that humanity is but a single bubble in the foam of evolution.
