Tolerating big government

In December, Gallup asked 824 U.S. adults this question: “In your opinion, which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future – big business, big labor or big government?”

Sixty-nine percent responded “big government.” That was down from 72 percent in 2013, but otherwise higher than at any other time Gallup has asked.

What exactly has big government done to these people?

Well, according to political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, it has improved their lives dramatically. Over the course of the 20th century, Hacker and Pierson write in their new book “American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper,” government investment, regulation and other interventions made Americans vastly better-educated, longer-lived and richer. Government action played a similar – and sometimes even bigger – role in virtually every other advanced nation.

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A big government isn’t a guarantee of prosperity, said Hacker and Pierson, “But where we find prosperity, we find big government, too.”

If that’s true, then why are people in the U.S. so sour on big government? In Hacker and Pierson’s telling, it’s mainly because of a decades-long propaganda campaign waged by anti-government activists on the right. One key technique, they write, is to: “Say the government isn’t doing its job, make it harder for the government to do its job, repeat.”

They’re specifically referring there to the long Republican offensive against the Internal Revenue Service. Still, saying that it’s the right-wingers’ fault feels incomplete. There has to be some reason why these anti-government arguments have struck such a chord. Two spring immediately to mind.

One is simply that there are diminishing returns to government bigness.

The other is that administering big government requires a level of specialization that makes it impossible for voters and even elected officials to fully understand and control it.

Those who are convinced that government is always and everywhere the problem probably aren’t going to be converted by a book that argues not only that government is the solution but also that anti-government activism is the problem.

There’s lots to criticize about current government policies, but there was never a government-free economic Eden in the U.S. to which we can aspire to return. Anyone who promises that is trying to sell a bill of goods. •

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist.

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