 I began to write a book in the early 1980s that was ultimately published in 1987 under the title Crisis in Leviathan, critical episodes in American economic history, and that's a book that covers American development in terms of the growth of government from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. But it doesn't cover everything uniformly as the subtitle suggests that it focuses on the so-called critical episodes, which I relate with the great national emergency periods, particularly World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, to a lesser extent the crisis period that extended from about 1963 to 73, embracing the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, a little less portentous, perhaps, but only a little less. In any event, what I did in this book was try to fill in the gap, so to speak. There had been many studies of the growth of government viewed as a long-term phenomenon, something that should be considered as a century-long or even longer process, and therefore explained by certain slow changes in the structure of the economy or the makeup of society, demographically or in terms of ethnic composition or lots of other aspects of the economic and social structure that generally changed slowly, and brought about a difference in the social structure and the economic structure of the economy over time with some consequences for how well politicians could succeed in their proposals to take various actions for government intervention. My task in Crisis and Leviathan was different, it was to say those long-term explanations are fine as far as they go, but they don't go nearly far enough because when we look at the profile of how government actually grew, we don't see a smooth growth process extending over a century. Instead, we see a smooth process interrupted periodically by lurches in the size of power and scope of government, and each occasion, after lurching upward during a war, during the Depression, there was some retrenchment, but only an incomplete retrenchment, and I call this phenomenon the ratchet phenomenon, a sudden growth of government associated with national emergency, either wartime or economic, was always associated during this period with an incomplete retrenchment, and therefore the growth of government that proceeded after the emergency took place from a higher baseline. And of course, as one proceeds through several episodes of this sort in succession, one ultimately finds the power and the size and the scope of the state at a much higher level than otherwise would have been reached had the old, slow, steady growth of government continued as it was, say, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So I argued then and I maintain now that the growth of government has to be understood as something that has many causes, many sources, but in one sense we can break them down into secular or long run slow acting causes and sudden emergency related causes. And we've seen, since the publication of that book, another example in the events that followed the attacks of 9-11, and we've seen how the government has taken advantage of the fright that those events created to greatly extend its power, particularly in terms of spending and deadness and surveillance powers over everybody. And so we have a confirmation here of what I argued in the book, and indeed if one looks at my book and the final page I forecasted that in the next great national emergency something of this kind would happen. So to this date I believe I've passed the test even by positivistic standards of accurate forecasting. But in all events, that book is for the most part a detailed, blow-by-blow account of what the government did during the great national emergencies of the 20th century. And I think I do go into more detail than other economists have in regard to explaining why the government authorities did what they did, what kinds of lobbies, what kinds of special interests were involved in jockeying for advantage in each case. And in showing that, in fact, these national emergencies are more than meets the eye because they're always the occasions on which opportunists, whether economic, political, or social, find it easiest to get what they're seeking. And so we have not just a vision here of the government as exploiting opportunities based on widespread public fear and uncertainty, but also of many special interests who leap into the fray and also use the opportunity to obtain privileges, to obtain subsidies, tax advantages, private powers backed by government, all the things that have been responsible for altering the United States from an economy of a rather minimal state to its present condition, which is a kind of participatory fascism, as I call it, in which special interests, corporate interests, labor interests, environmentalists interests, and a host of others all ally themselves with the state in a way that creates these vicious iron triangles. And the upshot is a hodgepodge of interferences in the daily life of everybody and a fearful situation. And I think my book, Crisis and Leviathan, does help anyone to gain an understanding of how we got from that old status quo around the beginning of the 20th century to the dire condition in which we find ourselves today.