And of course the irony is that their ideology never actually works, but it does turn them into valuable useful idiots.
The sincere ones among them want to cut things like crony-capitalism, regulatory capture and corporate welfare as well.
But that NEVER happens, instead by using their support for "small government" big business simply gets to have government plunder all the actual services it provides, and social safety netts and hand over the results to MORE crony capitalism.
I think the perfect example was Denver where the local government basically just took everybody's pensions because they "couldn't afford to pay them anymore" - but never cut a penny of their corporate welfare bill - which could have paid the pension liabilities ten times over !
Even their lord and saviour Ronald Reagan pulled of the scam perfectly. In theory the Laffer-curve based tax-cut concept is that you cut taxes for EVERYBODY, so EVERYBODY has more money, people spend it to buy things - and this means more business open (since there are customers to supply) so that means more jobs - and so even though you cut taxes very soon your revenues are higher than before. It ONLY works if you are AT the Laffer curve peak -any other time the tax cuts will simply mean less revenue, and the theory also demands that when you do it you cut ALL spending to the bone so you stay liquid until the increased revenue realizes, at which point you are supposed to end the austerity and use this higher revenue to fund bigger projects and MORE expansive social safety netts.
But you won't hear THAT from the politicians, they take a sound economic theory out of it's very narrow context and then apply it across the board - and what's worse, they only apply half of it. What DID Reagan do ?
He cut taxes only on the rich, then he increased spending - a LOT - especially on the military, and cut the social safety nett.
That's been the republican playbook ever since despite that fact that it never worked once in all that time. Well worked at what they said it would do - as a means of handing over poor and middle class folk's taxes to rich people it works brilliantly.
And the small government libertarians are the idiots who keep electing them because they promise to make government smaller and still haven't figured out the scam.