Government All Things to Everyone : Voters Say Yes

To think that once a government program is in place it can be reduced or eliminated in the future is unrealistic. It has not happened, or if it has, most people that depended on the program are now dead or mentally incapacitated.

It seems the only way for government now to become smaller, and less intrusive, is for the entire system to collapse. The frustrating element here is we have a front row seat on how the future will look if we don't find a way to stop the expansion of an ever expanding federal government, promising everything to everyone.

As the saying goes, 'a government that is powerful enough to provide all things is powerful enough to take away all things as well.'

History it littered with examples of how this has worked out. Every population that has become dependent on others for their personal survival found themselves ultimately in poverty or in a gulag. The scariest part is it might take decades, even generations, of citizens accepting the growth of dependency and the new life style of less achievement and loss of pride as normal, thereby each generation that follows accepting this life styles becomes more and more dependent.

The critic will say people will not allow this to happen, but the power of dependency and loss of a moral compass will dictate the outcome. Historians are already rewriting history to show how great this new society is and how we all will benefit from having less and believing personal freedom, the reason for our country being in decline, is a thing of the past. The 'collective' is the new way of life.

We're on the way now to this new utopia of everyone being no better than anyone else, no one having anything better then anyone else. We all will feel so much better. A level playing field. hmmmm Elections do have consequences. Why would anyone vote themselves into the nightmare of physical and mental poverty?

Can Big Government Be Rolled Back?
January 3, 2013
Source: Michael Barone, "Can Big Government Be Rolled Back?" American Enterprise Institute, December 7, 2012.

It is a rare proposition on which liberals and conservatives agree: American history over the last hundred years has been a story of the growth of the size and powers of government. This growth has not been steady. Conservatives, with some bitterness, have embraced a theory of ratchets: in every generation, liberals succeed in ratcheting up the size of government and conservatives fail to significantly reduce it, says Michael Barone, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., argued for a similar theory of cycles:

• We have periods when liberals succeed in expanding government and then periods when conservatives resist further expansion but do not roll back previous growth.
• In Schlesinger's view, each cycle of government growth begins with a major electoral victory for the Democratic Party: Woodrow Wilson's election in the three-way contest in 1912, the five consecutive victories of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman from 1932 to 1948, the landslide for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the victories of Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008.

The elections cited by Schlesinger can be taken as endorsements by voters of government expansion, though not unambiguously; note that Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 called for reducing federal budget deficits and Bill Clinton in 1992 called for ending "welfare as we know it."

But other elections can be taken as repudiations of big-government policies. They include Warren G. Harding's record-breaking winning percentage in 1920, the triumph of anti-New Deal Democrats and Republicans in 1938, the Republican congressional majorities elected in 1946, the significant Republican victories in 1966 and 1968, Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and the Republican congressional victories in 1994.

Barone examines the consequences of those elections, considering:

• How successful or unsuccessful were the efforts to reduce the size and scope of government?
• What implications do these episodes have for those who seek to reverse the recent growth in government spending as a percentage of the economy, which rose from the 20 percent to 21 percent level in the years from the 1960s to 2007 to 24 percent to 25 percent today?