The Growth of Government and the Emergence of Social Cancers

Since early in the twentieth century, governments throughout the Western world have massively expanded their place in society, regardless of how that expansion is measured. The easiest measure is the size of government budgetsGovernment budgets relative to national output. That figure was in the single digits even early into the twentieth century in the United States and not much higher in the other Western nations (see Tanzi 2017). Even more, the bulk of that governmental activity occurred among state and local governmentsLocal governments. Without doubt, this pattern of data reflected the original American ConstitutionAmerican Constitution which limited the federal government to 13 enumerated powers, with most governmental activity being the province of state and local governments. With people coming to live ever more closely together with one another, collisions among us will arise ever more often. Aggravations will surely arise among the sensations people feel within society relative to cheerfulness. Often in economics, we tend to talk about government action arising in response to real or perceived social and economic issues. In this chapter, we use this cheerfulness–aggravation distinction as a springboard for discussing why government has grown so drastically over the past century, and what the implications are for social order.