Quotable: Ellen Russell on the use of “Big Government”

“The term “big government” persists as a schizophrenic double standard. New programs that help the bottom line of business are endorsed by the business punditocracy as wise investments in competitiveness. Government programs that help the bottom lines of the rest of us are pejoratively denounced as “big government”. Hello, Orwellian doublespeak! What is good for business is in the public interest, while what is good for anybody else is just the self-serving whining of special-interest groups. The current economic crisis has shifted rhetoric, but this wacky double standard persists. Card-carrying opponents of big government have squeamishly conceded that government must intervene big time before capitalism hits the fan.”

–Ellen Russell, in Public Values