[citation needed] There is causative evidence to suggest the rise and fall of crime in the 20th century is directly linked to lead in consumer products, especially gasoline. Everything else is correlative and speculative, including the hypotheses that more police or more incarceration decrease crime.The drop in crime was not a result of smaller government; it was a result of better and smarter government, including more incarceration, elevated security, better intervention and prevention programs, an increase in police officers per capita, enforcing quality-of-life offenses, more effective identification of criminal patterns and more advanced use of data.
A lot of this is true, but it suffers from the attempt to set up a false dichotomy (both parties obviously guilty of this). This is a probably inevitable consequence of the two-party system. When there are only two parties, you can either build your party up, or simply emphasize how different it is from the other. Both will get you votes, similar amounts. Anyway, I think most people have a pretty twisted idea of US welfare history; that's definitely something to be aware of. And I agree about a couple of the points about crime reduction, but the general emphasis from economists, sociologists etc at the moment is that there are a lot of factors and no one is quite sure which ones have primacy. Modern American conservatism is truly a strange thing. It does not bear a whole lot of resemblance to any version of conservatism that has come before it.
Government is a entity that runs by different rules by businesses, and is a tool to be applied where it works best. Government is good at long term projects that help everyone, since government universally benefits from anyone working better and producing more. The government's interest is in tax income from citizens, building roads, education, and so on, directly lead to higher tax income with no negative effect on the population. Government is bad at innovation. It's bad at being efficient. That's where companies should be used. Government shouldn't tell people where to move, although it should build the roads that allow us to get to new places and accomplish greater things in the long term that aren't profitable as a business, but are in their effects across all society.