How did our government get to be as big as it is? How did we ever get to a place where we have millions of people casually (certainly not critically) thinking that the government can take care of them, that more and more taxes can be a good thing, and that bureaucrats can regulate economies better than free market forces?
History has given its answer very strongly to these theories, but they are harder to kill than the Terminator and The Agents from The Matrix put together.
"There is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program," said Ronald Reagan. And here we approach the root of the problem. What starts as a small program, perhaps well-intended extremely limited, promised only to apply to a select "few" (which is always a different set of people than those to which the appeal to support it is pandered; in the words of Congressman Bob McEwen, "When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the enthusiastic support of Paul!"), and maybe even hailed as a temporary measure, undoubtedly becomes entrenched, spawns new agencies and administration, gets expanded (something called "bracket creep" in the military), and grows to an indestructible size.
Take for instance the U.S. Income Tax. In 1913 the 16th Amendment to the Constitution made income tax a permanent method of revenue collection for the U.S. government; something that had previously only been primarily a war-time expedient. Promises were made that it would only affect "the rich" (sound familiar?), and that it would always remain small (do any of you think that 24 to 38 % is small?). In fact (and I think you'll notice the appeal to class warfare and envy in this statement, something else that should sound familiar) the income tax was sold to the people as a "Class tax" and not a "Mass tax." Although it is progressive, can anyone truly say it doesn't impact the masses? It impacts almost all of us.
What happened?
In the eighteen hundreds, Yale professor William Graham Sumner said that "well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects." Andrew Mellon, secretary of the Treasury during three presidential administrations in the early nineteen-hundreds, wrote, "Any man of energy and initiative in this country can get what he wants out of life. But when initiative is crippled by legislation or by a tax system which denies him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself and the country will be deprived of the energy on which its continued greatness depends."
In other words, if progressives in favor of big government and increased taxation are able to dupe enough people into following their programs, the goose that lays the golden eggs will eventually, pardon the pun, give up the goose. Taxing the engine of production that pulls the whole train along can only work to a certain extent. Eventually, the overtaxed engine can no longer pull against the resitance and all forward progress stops.
Do we really have to relive the 1930's all over again to prove that a big government and its interventions can kill an economy?
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