While many call the United States government big, it is not in comparison to other western industrialized nations like Britain and France.

While the United States government has come a long way since its many limitations hundreds of years ago, the government became less limited with every piece of legislation that was passed by the Congress and signed by the President, it is still among the more limited governments in the industrialized world.

One of the ways government is limited is, ironically, their healthcare system and even though healthcare amounts to one of the biggest costs in each year’s federal budget, the United States is the only industrialized western nation that does not have nationalized health insurance.

Another way that the government is limited is that even though the government takes a huge chunk of every American’s paycheck, the tax rates are not as high as they are in other nations such as Britain and France.

Over the years, government has also become very limited in regards to regulating the economy and commerce which is also one of the main reasons for the 2008 economic meltdown.

THE LIMITED U.S. HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

HEALTHCARE

Despite the fact that the United States spends an enormous part of its yearly budget on healthcare programs like Medicaid and Medicare, one of the ways government is limited is in the healthcare industry.

Despite being the self described leader of the free world, the United States is the only western industrialized nation that does not offer free nationalized health insurance to all of its residents.

Britain, France, and Canada all allow their nationals to receive free healthcare making the American government more limited on the issue of health insurance.

TAXES

Despite all of the griping by Americans about how much the government takes out of the paycheck the fact is that it can be much worse as it is in industrialized nations in Europe.

While in the United States the average tax bracket comes out to around a third of the average American’s pay, the British and the French pay much higher taxes on just about every single thing.

The British and French have higher income and payroll taxes, higher capital gains taxes, higher property taxes, and a plethora of other taxed aspects of European life.

WAYS GOVERNMENT IS LIMITED. REGULATION

The government has, especially since the rise of Milton Freidman and Alan Greenspan economics, not been a good regulator of the economy and of commerce.

This lack of regulation, which has been pushed consistently by the Republicans in Congress, has created a volatile environment in the American economy.

This lack of regulation over the undoing of the American financial corporations has been attributed to the economic collapse of 2008 as the government was simply not in place to make sure that the loans that they were pushing to be given out to less fortunate people were not being distributed to completely poor people who could never pay back their loans.