Why Big Government Will Inevitably Lead to the End of America

Our own government is our greatest threat

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage." -- Unknown, but often attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler or Alexis de Tocqueville

Anarchy sounds fun in that teenage sort of way where you love the idea of doing whatever you want and not having to obey anyone’s rules. As a side note, that’s probably one of the reasons why zombie movies are so popular. It allows people to imagine a world where everyone starts from scratch and there are no rules. That big mansion on the hill? You can go live in there. You can go to the supermarket or the mall and just take anything you want. No matter what you do, no authority is going to show up and hold you accountable. Depending on your perspective, it’s either incredibly exciting (I get to do those things!) or deeply terrifying (Oh no, everyone else gets to do those things, too!).

Once you start recognizing that if you don’t organize to protect yourself, other people may organize to victimize you, then you start to understand why a government is necessary at all. It leads you to the first of three crucial duties of government.

1. Law and order.

Then the natural question becomes, “How can we create a government that preserves as much of each person’s freedom and natural rights as much as possible?” This is not as simple as it seems at first glance because human beings have different values, morals, and principles. Additionally, one of the things people are best at doing is justifying doing the wrong thing, as any of us who’ve said, “I’m going on a strict diet starting Monday” can say from personal experience.  

Still, a set of broad, mostly mutually agreed-upon principles that lead to laws and enforcement of them is necessary for a democratic form of government to function.

So, we may say that someone can CHOOSE to sell you their land, but you can’t put a gun to their head and force them to sell it to you at pennies on the dollar. Someone can open up a business and sell you food, but they can’t pick up cow flop from the fields and use it as a filler for strawberry pies. You can express your opinion, and someone can express it back, but you can’t cut someone’s head off with a sword because they said it should be illegal to serve pizza without pineapples.

Once you set up a system to enforce these rules, you’re ready for the next step.

2. Protection from outsiders.

Once that basic set of rules is agreed upon, then the government needs to control the borders of your nation and take steps to protect you from outsiders. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your society is if a horde of barbarians can ride over the hill and sack it at will. As the late, great Margaret Thatcher put it:

3. Doing things we want to do together at a scale that we can’t easily do individually.

Sometimes, there are things that it makes sense to collectively do together. Roads, fire departments, stop signs, sewage systems, etc. We can actually have a very healthy debate about how much of these things we truly need to do as a society. For example, in many places, toll roads could take the place of government-built highways. For-profit, privately-run prisons (sometimes) or schools (usually) can be preferable to government-run institutions. UPS and FedEx are much more competent than the United States Postal Service.

However, it’s undeniable that it just makes more sense to come together and collectively do certain things. If the richest guy in town is funding the police force, guess who’s not getting arrested if he gets drunk and runs into your car? Do you really want traffic lights or street signs put up only if someone is willing to fund them? How about sidewalks? Those are pretty nice, right? Would they get built without the government? The same goes for certain roads, public transportation, and garbage collection.

What has been described so far in this column is the sort of government that would have been in line with the one imagined by the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The key phrase in there is, “the consent of the governed.” If we genuinely had the sort of small, limited government that was described above, that would be relatively easy to achieve. Diehard liberals, conservatives, and libertarians might not agree on much, but we could all mostly agree that we don’t want to be enslaved by other nations, we like sidewalks and yes, it is nice to have people pick up our trash rather than having everyone just toss it in the middle of the street.

If we had stuck to small, limited government in America, you can be certain that our budget would be under control, we’d be much more prosperous without the government siphoning off so much money from the private sector and the vast majority of the things we fight about politically today wouldn’t be issues.

So, why did we move towards big government? Because unfortunately, a lot of selfish people want things they can’t get via persuasion or merit. They want other people’s money without earning it. They want to force people to comply. They want the world to be forced to change in ways that benefit and suit them. When these people found politicians who wanted cushy jobs and were more concerned about that than their duty to the public, we went all the way down the slippery slope one precedent, compromise, and bad decision at a time from a government that had no income tax and seriously debated whether it was a good idea to have a standing army to a leviathan that spent more in 2021 ($6.82 trillion) than the world’s GDP in 1976 (6.42 trillion).

There are a whole host of problems with the monstrosity that America’s government has become, but one of the biggest is that our politicians are now so obsessed with debating, discussing, and fighting over all the things the government shouldn’t even be doing that they’ve become incompetent at many of the basic tasks we needed a government for in the first place. Even as crime was going up in 2020, many big cities were pulling police off the streets and making it easier to loot, riot, and shoplift. Illegal aliens are surging over our borders by design. We have the most amazing military that has ever existed, but we keep managing to maneuver it into no-win situations that lead to spectacular failures.

As to “doing things we want to do together at a scale that we can’t easily do individually,” that whole idea has been flipped on its head. If Americans were allowed to choose whether they kept their tax dollars or gave them to the government to fund particular projects, what percentage of government programs do you think a majority of Americans would support funding? Certainly not very many.

If let’s say, 75% of the public wouldn’t be willing to pay five dollars towards a federal program, should it exist at all? The obvious answer is “no,” but if we applied that standard, the majority of government programs would undoubtedly go away. In a nation with big government, it isn’t about serving the public, it’s about serving the politician’s need to get elected.

How do politicians get elected in a nation with a big government? By doling out favors and privileges to their supporters or by taking money from people that don’t vote for them and funneling it to people that do (the Democrats), or alternately, by vowing to protect their supporters from the other side that wants to take their money and disadvantage them (Republicans). Ultimately, the problem with all this is that it leads to politicians that become increasingly obsessed with recriminations, bribes, and increasingly gross pandering while they operate a government that can’t competently do anything that matters. Once you get to that point, people lose faith in the government and only continue to remain within the system because of inertia or fear that things might get even worse if they broke away. Eventually, things degrade until the whole rotting hulk collapses into revolution, civil war, or a dictatorship.  How close are we to that? It’s impossible to say, but big government is leading us closer to that disaster every day.

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