Thank you, Stephen!
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While it is interesting to discuss the increases of the size of government over the last century, it is also interesting to look at the hidden increase in government, and then to look at the combined effects of both upon our economy and our liberty.
One thing you quickly discover when looking into the size and growth of government is a vast disparity of published data both governmental and private and that it is not generally the result of different political agendas but inherent in the nature of the data collections themselves and what is included in the relative measure of GDP and government spending.
Fortunately, for our present purposes, I am not concerned with the precise measures of the government spending but the trend of the leviathan to grow like a bloated beast consuming everything around it and taking the food from the mouths of your children and the shirt from your very back.
Okay, that’s a little melodramatic, but not overly so given that on what you are left to live is that by definition which is not consumed by your neighbor, whether that neighbor is a friend, a criminal, or the state.
Federal government expenditures alone, as states in last week’s post, have risen from about 2.1% of GDP to over 22% of GDP, with that primary increase occurring with Roosevelt’s massive increase in the size and scope of government under his Raw Deal and during World War II and the establishment of a permanent “military-industrial” complex as Eisenhower named it.
However, when you combine federal, state, and local expenditures, the government has gone from just over 8% and is now consuming between 36% to 46% of the nation’s GDP depending upon how you measure it.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
While some people are concerned more with how the money is spent, and often wasted on futile and hopeless causes such as prohibition, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, and various social spending projects, that is not what I am concerning myself with today, but I’ll provide some information for you to digest in the meantime:
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/
However, what I’m actually concerned about in this post is not the actual spending of the various levels of government, but the hidden or covert spending of the government through regulation of its citizenry, and the growth of that regulation.
Just to give you a measure, realize that while the government has been growing vastly in terms of your money it is taxing and spending, it has simultaneously been growing by increasing your costs through regulation of businesses and industries, and even your home and community such as regulating your property through zoning and public nuisance, your car inspections and licenses, et cetera.
Every regulation is a tax, but it is a tax off the books. You as the citizen bear the cost but that cost is not included in those charts showing the growth of government which merely look at expenditures by the government.
If you simply measure the burden of regulations merely by the volume of those regulations in the total number of words which you as a citizen are bound to comply, the growth in words is staggering. Remember, ignorance of the regulation is no excuse.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-23/cost-us-regulatory-compliance-20000-employee
It is easy to dwell upon the added costs to your life of all of this regulation, how it costs about $20,000 per year per worker in America. Id.
Here is a great visual of the regulatory growth: https://www.mercatus.org/video/visualizing-growth-federal-regulation-1950
It is also easy to dwell upon the fact that such regulation is often at the behest of large corporate interests to create a protectionist burden to keep smaller companies from effectively competing against them, a cronyism promoted largely by leftists, but sometimes by people on the right as well.
And for those mercantilists in the readership who are more concerned with growth than with prosperity, one can get distracted by the cumulative effect such regulation has had on our economy simply by slowing the growth of our economy.
https://reason.com/archives/2013/06/21/federal-regulations-have-made-you-75-per
https://www.mercatus.org/publication/cumulative-cost-regulations
There is an additive effect of growth upon growth of government, the hidden government burden of regulation. Look back at the chart of the growth of government expenditures, and then add to that sum the value of the growing regulatory burden which has also been growing over the decades. Then you begin to see the real size of government in your daily life, and just why politics seems to be taking such a large chunk out of your life which ought to be a minor concern.
Then, I’d like the reader to realize the stealth nature of the regulatory burden along with the creeping increase in its intrusiveness.
The difference between the Nazis and the Communists was not that they were not both socialist, but that the Nazis developed a system where they pretended that you still owned your property, they merely regulated and oversaw what you were permitted to do with it.
The citizen’s ownership was of legal title, but not equitable. The property was for the use of the state, they just pretended it was yours. The communists were not so subtle. Subtle is dangerous, and a government controlling your property, controlling your behavior through regulation is more insidious than an honest tyrant.
One of the things which has been surprisingly impressive by the Trump administration is the quite, and unreported, roll-back of many burdensome regulations which have bolstered this economy. However, this is also very troubling because all regulation is executory, and such regulation could easily be reinstated the minute he is out of office just like much of Obama’s legacy of building that regulation.
An ephemeral, temporary respite, may not last. It is not true reform.
