In This House We Believe
The News is Corrupt
The Government is Too Big
Politicians Lie
Socialism is the Gospel of Envy
Fiat Currency is Fraud
And Ayn Rand was Right.
The Third President of the US, Thomas Jefferson observed over 250 years ago, “I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have. … The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”
Things have only moved in one direction since the times of Jefferson. Government grows. The US economist Milton Friedman is credited with saying something along the lines of there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. Things follow a pattern. Small, innocuous start, for a limited time to offer assistance which morphs ever larger for ever longer. The number of departments, staff, laws, and regulations have all increased year after year. In Canada, federal regulations alone grew over 37% between 2006 and 2021. These regulations impose burdens on businesses operating in Canada. The number of hours required to adhere to regulations results in billions of dollars being spent. It’s a weight dragging down productivity.
In the US, government spending on welfare programs as a percentage of GDP has grown over twelve times since the 1960s. The number of “benefits” offered by government has grown substantially in the past sixty years. Food benefits like the SNAP program in the US has gone from serving 2% of Americans to over 13% in 50 years. Well over forty million Americans avail themselves of this program alone. More programs, more dependent citizens. More programs, more pressure on the remaining taxpayers.
Alex Berenson recently pointed out the mushroom growth explosion of Medicaid in the State of New York. Government spending has grown 12-fold over less than 40 years from $10B in 1988 to around $120B today. Factoring in both inflation and population growth, the spend per person is now fourfold what it was yet the health of citizens isn’t four times better. It’s not even the same as it was. When the Government grows so, too, does its gravy train. Grifters gravitate to the trough seeking for a piece of the pie. Fraud becomes rampant. Look at what Minnesota is showcasing as a textbook example of government programs run amok.
Growth in social services, too, puts a strain on average Canadians. Social services cost money, money which is collected from taxes. The average Canadian family pays over 40% of their income in one tax or another. Taxes are the largest family expenditure exceeding the costs of housing, food, and clothing combined. Moreover, the average family is spending over 50% more on taxes than was spent in the 1960s. As government grows, burdens on taxpayers grow. Onerous tax obligations act as dead weight driving down progress and ambition. Taxes are the ball and chain limiting how far Canadians can go to improve their standard of living.
Having tax obligations that exceed total housing, food, and clothing expenses absolutely reflects a government that is too big. As David Bahnsen writes in There’s No Free Lunch, “A larger government even without deficit spending crowds out the private sector, and ultimately, disincentives productive activity.”
In Canada, the public sector accounts for almost a quarter of jobs. Government job growth is higher than that of the private sector or self-employed. The self-employed have been flat since 2015 while private sector jobs have grown slightly. Job growth for government work has led all job growth over the past decade. Over 950,000 government jobs were created between 2015 and 2024.
As government grows in departments, staff, regulations, and tax demand so, too, does its power over citizens. More rulers, more rules, more demands on everyday people. Tax burdens coupled with behavioral burdens. Governments seem to operate with less transparency and accountability whereas the privacy of citizens is pulverized. Ayn Rand foresaw this direction fifty years ago noting, “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
President Ronald Reagan also gave us, “I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.” Government growth is incompatible with individual initiative and independence. More recently, President Trump’s efforts with Elon Musk to create DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency as well-intentioned as they were, have fizzled, reflecting that the gears of government grind along inexorably despite efforts to slow them down. Moreover, even Trump spent some time campaigning on a proposal of cutting back US defense spending. He even proposed cutting it in half. Within months of term two he boasted about the largest defense spend ever reaching one trillion dollars. A year later, he’s now proposed a fifty per cent increase to the already record defense budget. Government grows and grows. No matter who’s in power. No matter the country.
This article describes the entrenched nature of bureaucracies and US government expansion.
This article illustrates a slow-motion impact of unchecked government growth and mismanagement of finances to a nation’s economy.
“Big-Government Socialisms, NOT Capitalism, Caused Economic Disasters in the 1930s, 2000-2002, 2008, and the 2020s”
Ray Dalio Twitter Essay …
