The Larger the Government, The Smaller the Citizen

We live in an era of burgeoning government. One hallmark of the Obama Administration has been the Dodd-Frank Bill (Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act H.R. 4173) designed to identify risks to the financial stability of the U.S. and promote market discipline. The other has been the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, designed to make health care much more of a responsibility of the Federal Government by adding layers of regulation into health care access.

I have looked as carefully as I can into these two bills; and I find them incomprehensible in their complexity and sheer size. In my opinion, they will almost double the size to the Federal Government.

We, as citizens of the United States, need to be very suspicious of such sweeping legislation and look at burgeoning governments of the past to evaluate such programs.

In The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, I read, “Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last. First they improve society’s ability to flourish by providing central services and removing impediments to trade and specialization; thus, even Genghis Kahn’s Pax Mongolica lubricated Asia’s overland trade by exterminating brigands along the Silk Road, thus lowering the cost of oriental goods in European parlors.” Later, however, a pattern was set which has been followed by governments ever since. Aging governments “employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today. Economists are quick to speak to speak of ‘market failure,’ and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure.’ Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.”