Big v. Small?

Sorry blogging's been light today, folks. Lots of phone calls to make, legalistic stories to write. But I wanted to call attention to this post of Ross Douthat's, since he's about to leave Atlantic Media for the New York Times editorial page and I felt like I should link to him before he goes.

The piece is a lot more philosophical than I usually get here on the blog. But one section of it caught my eye. Ross writes:

I don't want to dismiss the arguments about the practical costs and benefits associated with different styles of welfare states, mind you. I like those arguments, and they matter a great deal. I would just deny that they can come close to settling, in any meaningful sense, the debate over how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it. That's because both the American and the European models of government are successful in purely practical terms, to the extent that purely practical terms exist - which is to say, both models have provided, over an extended period of time, levels of prosperity and stability unparalleled in human history.

One way to go about deciding how big government should be is to decide what you value in society, as Ross writes later in the post. But another way to decide how big government should be is to develop quality measures that tell you how good it is at certain things. And then you can decide that there are some things government should or shouldn't do because of how good it is at doing those things.