Big Government (Minsky)

Big Government, in Hyman Minsky's specific usage, refers to a government with sufficient fiscal capacity to act as an economic stabilizer — maintaining aggregate demand when private spending collapses, employing workers when private employers shed them, investing in infrastructure when private investment retreats. The term is technical rather than ideological. It does not describe intrusive government or controlling government; it describes government large enough, and fiscally capable enough, to serve as the ultimate backstop against the endogenous instabilities of capitalist economies. Minsky argued throughout his career that the moderation of postwar business cycles compared to pre-New Deal cycles was attributable to Big Government's automatic stabilizers — unemployment insurance, Social Security, progressive taxation, countercyclical fiscal policy — whose combined effect was to place a floor beneath which private-sector contractions could not push the economy. The Opus 4.6 simulation applies the concept to the AI economy's structural displacement, arguing that existing Big Government mechanisms are inadequate to the specific disruptions AI is producing.