Daniel McCarthy believes that the shutdown is doing serious damage to the cause of small government:
Reducing and restructuring government is going to take time and careful planning, but what we see from the Republicans—abetted by certain activist groups and entertainers who feed off over-emotional listeners, viewers, and donors—is a party whose leadership and record in power is big government and whose committed small-government faction is crippling rather than augmenting its appeal to the country as a whole. This is a recipe for defeat of the small-government faction in future presidential nominating contests—where the Republican Party has shown a longstanding preference for candidates who seem like they can win over centrist voters—and that means even if a Republican can win the White House again in the near future, he’s more likely to be a Republican in the Bush mold.
Larison nods:
Toying around with default threatens to impose greater costs on American taxpayers rather than reduce them. It is the perfect example of striking a symbolic blow against fiscal irresponsibility while adding to the country’s fiscal problems. If one seriously wants to control and reduce government debt, raising the debt ceiling ought to be the last thing that one worries about, since refusing to raise it simply makes paying off the debt that has already been incurred more expensive. Making useless “stands” of this kind not only make small-government conservative ideas unappealing to many other Americans and provoke backlashes against them, but they make even those that agree with many of those ideas conclude that their representatives are ill-suited to governing.
The Dish 