 Instead of telling some jokes to get us off the ground tonight, I'll just call to your attention some news items that have struck me recently that I think have some bearing on my subject tonight about the growth of government and the possibility that government will not continue to grow as it has for a long time. The first one is from an editorial in the Washington Post called the Roosevelt Legacy. Actually this Washington Post reminds me of a story that I was told one time about the CIA having discovered that an enormous meteor was going to strike the Earth in only a week. And of course because it was the CIA they were unable to keep this to themselves and it was leaked. And so the press got hold of it and the next morning column one Wall Street Journal story in the usual size type said giant meteor will destroy Earth in one week, Dow falls 200 points. And that day that USA Today said giant meteor will destroy Earth in one week, how we feel about it. And then it had a full-color pie chart. And the Washington Post reported giant meteor will strike Earth and destroyed in one week women and minorities will suffer most. So that tells you something about the source, of course you all know about the source anyhow you're here in the belly of the beast almost. In this editorial on the Roosevelt Legacy the editorialist observed Roosevelt was truly convinced that government could do good and he made it so. It is a sign of his achievement that so many of his policy monuments social security the securities and exchange commission wages and hours laws are virtually unassailable. And further on it says it is of course common now to declare the New Deal dead. The Roosevelt Legacy a thing of the past and it is true that even the most ardent of the surviving New Dealers would concede that many of the programs created for the 1930s are not appropriate for the 1990s. But the Roosevelt Legacy is precisely not a fixed body of doctrine. Roosevelt himself was the first to reject the dogmatic application of anyone's theories uh including his own. The country needs uh now we're quoting Roosevelt the country needs and unless I mistake its temper the country demands bold persistent experimentation. He once declared it is common sense to take a method and try it if it fails admit it frankly and try another but above all try something in quote it is not a bad approach to government for his time or ours says the post. I have another uh news item here from uh the post as translated by the international herald tribune reporting a poll according to the results of a national poll reduced uh released uh must have been shortly before april the 20th this is dated it says uh few americans think that cutting federal programs will improve government performance the poll indicated the bureaucrats not the problems were not excuse me not the programs were seen as government's greatest impediment uh the public has not really given up on government said peter heart upholster when you give them a choice they will tell you that we need better management not necessarily smaller government or giving all the responsibility to the states the poll also showed support for the democrats view that government can help if properly applied and one more item here also from a poll washington post abc news poll this uh comes on may the 18th so it's fairly recent since the oklahoma city bombing a new uh poll suggests that americans have rallied in defense of a much maligned target big brother satisfaction with the federal government is up the survey found anger is down most of those interviewed said they basically trust the federal government a big majority said americans are too quick to criticize in other ways the survey suggests that americans are reexamining just how angry they are with their national government after seeing the tragic consequences of real rage in oklahoma city at the same time the survey found narrow but deep pockets of rage and suspicion those questions saw government grabbing more and more of their individual rights but a majority was willing to surrender even more personal freedom to the government to stop terrorism and while many express deep suspicions of government they fear the armed and anti-government militias more can you imagine someone who fears militias more than the federal government most of these people had never heard of militias four weeks ago overwhelming majorities of those interviewed including those critical of government said private militias represent a bigger threat to their personal rights and freedoms than the federal government does well i don't think i can bear to read any more of that to you but i read these things partly because perhaps you uh tend to hang out as i do with people of somewhat like mind and i think uh in doing so we can sometimes get a very distorted impression of what is typical of the beliefs of our countrymen uh very distorted i'm not a great believer in polls i realized they can be rigged twisted distorted misinterpreted and so forth but at the same time i think that they sometimes convey information and i i've tried to make use of them on occasion when i thought i could do so reliably and uh when i look at polls i don't really see at any time in recent years evidence of any profound change in the typical americans attitude toward the federal government or government in general obviously many people are unhappy with the amount of their taxes uh specific small groups of people are unhappy with specific narrowly focused types of regulation that bear on them particularly hard but uh i don't see anything in the data i've examined on public opinion that would lead me to forecast any ideological revolution now i'm always prepared to be wrong in this case i very much hope i am wrong and that my more optimistic friends are correct but i'm withholding judgment right now so the title that was announced for this talk rise and fall with a question mark of leviathan is meant to suggest that i await persuasion that something fundamental has changed uh republicans have been elected in the past indeed the shortly after i was born republicans took control of the congress after uh years and years of domination by democrats in 1946 and many people were swept away and thought that a new deal was going to be dismantled nothing of the sort happened they hardly made a dent in it republicans of course came came to control the congress again when isan har was elected and some people still hoping against hope thought now they'll dismantle the welfare state and the new deal but of course they did nothing of the sort then either so i don't view the election of republicans as in itself especially auspicious republicans have shared in the guilt for the growth of government for a long long time now they they've been part of the government even though they've not often controlled it sometimes when i talk about the growth of government i like to give people an impression of how much it's grown and i i have a number of data that i use for this recently i put some new ones together these involve taxes i think if you've never done the arithmetic they're quite striking i started off by looking at taxes per capita in the united states at the beginning of this century actually 1902 at that time per capita taxation was 22 dollars that's federal state and local now of course a dollar was worth more than it is now about 18 times more according to the price indices so let's let's make it 20 so in today's dollars this would be a per capita tax burden for all levels of government of about 400 dollars right now that is the last year 1994 the per capita tax burden in the united states was seven thousand six hundred and sixty five dollars okay so four hundred to seven thousand six hundred and sixty five in constant dollars per capita what does that mean i mean that's such a big proportional increase it's hard to to hold in the mind to think about how much the tax burden has changed well you say that's ancient history well let's talk about recent times let's talk about say comparing last year with 1980 the year when ronald reagan's election led many of my friends to erroneously suppose that big government was about to take a beating many people got quite carried away i recall vividly they thought our ship has come in now the per capita tax burden in current dollar that is today's dollars 1994 dollars in 1980 was six thousand and fifty six dollars so it's it's gone up 26 percent in real per capita terms since reagan was elected and during a period which except for the past two years republicans had the white house the whole time not very encouraging trends it seems to me but i don't think that's the worst of it i actually think that regulation has increased the burden of government in terms of depriving people of their rights and liberties to an extent that the data on budgets and spending and taxing do not suggest at all now that that is only my hunch because there's no metric here there's no way i can give you a common denominator but i've been a fairly active observer of the regulatory scene for the past 15 years and i find it really startling what has happened during that time of course the the the deregulation that was supposed to take place under reagan didn't happen there was a little bit of deregulation and a handful of industries but at the same time in other areas the regulation in areas like land use at every level from county city and county governments right on up to the federal government was becoming little short of draconian environmental regulations restrictions growing out the endangered species act one that i've worked on especially a lot in the past few years involving the food and drug administration where uh the term jack booted thugs is perfectly applicable perfectly applicable if these are the actions of a free government then i'm the king of albania well i don't want to just uh whine while i'm here uh let me try to give you a little different perspective on whether we can reasonably expect uh the growth of government to be reigned in slowed down at least uh in the next few years even though it has continued to grow quite rapidly up to today and if you don't think up till today then go get your latest issue of the federal register and see what's been put in there in the past week you'll find it's bulking up at least the same rate it has been for a long time uh i i think uh if one has a decent theory of why government has grown in the past then that theory ought to also be useful in making some forecasts about the future that doesn't mean that it allows me to be a fortune teller because history is full of what economists call exogenous shocks things that aren't part of the system that's internally determinate so we may have plenty of exogenous shocks in the future just as we have in the past and so no one can predict in the social sciences the way prediction can be done in physics or chemistry and i certainly don't pretend to be a predictor in that sense but at the same time if our explanations of past events are any good at all they should help to guide us informing expectations about the future now as bumper mentioned i i have done a fair amount of research and written a book on the growth of american government from the late 19th century up to the mid-1980s and uh so what i'd like to do is just recall or summarize quite briefly some of the main themes of that book uh how i accounted for the government's growth during that time if those themes are really productive of insight then they should give us some clues or guides as to what to look for if government's going to to change its course in future one of the things that are somewhat regretted about my book's reception by the public was that it was understood by many people as espousing the crisis hypothesis and in a way that's a forgivable error if you read only the title but i was at some pains in the book to emphasize that it was not a mono causal explanation and to concede that there are a variety of explanatory variables that make some sense in accounting for the growth of government over that century some of these you can wrap up in in the economist notion of government responding to so-called market failures in fact in mainstream economics this is about all the theory of the growth of government there is and government is viewed as this kind of automaton that simply automatically responds to take whatever actions are required to correct market failures arising from negative external uh effects from uh demand for public goods which the market isn't supplying from monopoly powers being exerted in an unregulated market and so on and so on uh i won't say much about these because i i have never been persuaded that they're very important in actually understanding why government grew they're more like rationales or apologies exposed for various government activities but when i add them all up they don't have much weight in the overall level of what government has been doing and doing more and more often in the past century there are some some kinds of government actions like say what the EPA does that can be plausibly connected with attempts to to combat negative external effects there are some quasi-public goods that the government supplies and one might halfway plausibly argue that the market wouldn't have supplied them but i don't think all of that's worth pausing too long over in my book i spend more time on it but it's not important enough to belong to a summary another kind of explanation sometimes advanced for the growth of government is the idea that government is preeminently a redistributor of income and over time it's become more and more so and particularly become more and more so in a pecuniary fashion in the 19th century the federal government particularly in this country had the great good fortune of being able to do good things for the government supporters without burdening the budget especially it had the national domain which it could give away and so rather than sending grandma check in those days it sent the the northern pacific railroad a land grant the size of montana or close to it so government was able to help a lot of its friends without having to spend a lot of money and therefore finance that spending in the 19th century up until the civil war government did very important things to protect the institution of slavery which was terribly important to people who own slave property again that didn't leave much of a imprint on the budget so it's wrong I think to suppose that government was unimportant in the 19th century or that the United States was ever a case of laissez-faire it wasn't and particularly at the local level there were always a certain amount of busy body intrusions going on and in the late 19th century the states began to do more and more of that as well so this was never a free market paradise but of course all things being relative compared to now it was a free market paradise for almost everybody except the slaves but in the 20th century government redistribution is increasingly taking the form of either giving people money or giving them things that the government had to pay for itself and then making in kind transfers so redistributive activities have become very important and in a way that's just describing one aspect of the growth of government rather than explaining it you say well why why did it become more important than before and then we can start talking about interest group theories and about the fact that in the 20th century many more groups got organized to lobby the government and pressure politicians to make these redistributive transfers and that probably has something to do with among other things the fall in costs of communication and transportation which made it far easier for people to get organized for political action than it was in the 19th century with much more primitive means of communication and transportation so maybe we we need to blame the telephone for our troubles I know it's often my world connected with the increased level of redistributive activity in the 20th century has been an ideological change to some extent this is just a flip flop in another way it's an ongoing change the flip flop took place around the beginning of this century during the progressive era and what I think happened then was that at least among opinion leaders there was a switch from a predominant allegiance to limited government to a predominant preference for activist government the progressives seem naive to us now and maybe they they seemed that way to wise men even then I know minkin certainly had some insightful things to say about people of progressive mentality so we didn't have to wait to the 90s to to see the naivete but the progressive ideology was one that put great faith in government's capacity to do good it was the precursor of what the washington post calls the roosevelt legacy here because it trusted government officials particularly those who weren't elected officials but were appointed officials they were different they were supposedly non-political and so if we simply appointed authoritative experts and let them do the technically correct thing then we could solve all kinds of social problems that was a pretty silly idea then the notion that these people would be outside of politics when they were doing things that had a significant effect on society or that they would be disinterested for long neither was the case and of course these various progressive institutions one of which is the food and drug administration have in many cases developed to be thoroughly politicized in some cases they were that from the very beginning but nonetheless the ideology wouldn't die as you can see the washington post editorialists are still wedded to it today and a multitude of our fellow americans are still wedded to it today the extent to which people are still prepared to believe that government can do good things for them and i almost do good things for everybody simultaneously solving sort of squaring a bastion circle there that our ultimate dream being that we will all each of us live at the expense of the others the belief persists i think very strongly and i think the post in these polls i cited correctly gauge that many people still believe that the only thing we need is better people different politicians different people appointed to agencies and will clean up the problems their problems of implementation they're not problems of basic institutional structure so long as people believe that they are quite predisposed to turn to government for their salvation especially when they're afraid of something and so the last news item i mentioned is pertinent here because even after an event like the bombing in oklahoma city which i don't think justified anyone's suspecting that this was the beginning of an immense wave of such bombings which would endanger people all over the country but nonetheless even with such an act of what any lebanese must regard as minor terrorism americans to a large extent seem to have bolted admitted the error of suspecting there was something wrong with a huge federal government and even confessed to the sin of encouraging baby bombers by by condoning criticism of the government and its agents and there's of course been immense back in play in the newspapers ever since on this topic of affecting the climate of opinion and bearing guilt for the death of innocent children and so forth but the thing it continues to strike me is that so many people seem seriously to espouse the linkage idea that those of us who criticize the government especially the federal government bear some guilt for the actions of anyone who chooses to explode a bomb in public well my own view is a kind of combination i think government grew partly because of the organization of interest groups to redistribute income that was connected to some extent with the adoption of progressive ideology and its reinforcement as a result of the great depression and the the world wars which encouraged many people particularly in world war two to think of the federal government as a very capable set of actors to all here's the united states we're all told almost single-handedly defeating great powers all over the world seldom mentioned you know that the ratio of soviet casualties to american is more like 40 to 1 so maybe we didn't win the war but we were on the winning side that's for damn sure and a lot of people came away from the war thinking the united states victory in world war two demonstrated that not only could the federal government win a war but it could organize an economy to serve that end very effectively command economy that we had in 1942 through 1945 i think these crises have reinforced at least they did up into the 1960s or so people's long run drift toward more progressive ideological leanings the upshot of this by the time we get to say post world war two period is that what had been the only effective fundamental checks to the growth of government before which i think mainly came from the way the constitution was understood and particularly the way it was enforced by the supreme court and from even more fundamentally from the reigning ideology of the country which was suspicious of government's capabilities and suspicious of politicians goodwill and in many cases particularly in 19th century regarded government is dangerous all of those things are gone by 1950 so from that point on the only thing it's really slowed the growth of government at all is simply partisan wrangling it's just the fact that whenever government adopts some new measure there are always some people who don't like it or get hurt by it and so frequently they organize to resist it and sometimes that resistance will be effective for a while but if there are no fundamental checks they always lose sooner or later and so what has happened is that progressively all of those battles have been lost over the last 40 years and the net result has been a government they got bigger and bigger in every dimension taxing spending regulating and stomping all over traditional American rights and liberties along the way now if that general view of why government grew in the past is correct what would we suspect today has there been any fundamental change in ideology i don't think so maybe i'm wrong if there has been this will eventually be very important has there been any change in the supreme court's view of the constitution no there was there have been a few isolated cases of very insignificant proportion in recent years that of course revives all hope among lovers of liberty that the supreme court is going to revert to its pre-1937 respect for rights but these things have been so trivial that they amount to nothing you know the Lopez decision which was written about in many places recently concerns a totally trivial matter so we can be fully enslaved regardless of the Lopez decision so i don't see any revolution in the supreme court's jurisprudence i don't see any i'm not persuaded of any fundamental ideological change i don't see any change in our basic political institutions the way we make laws in congress and provisions of our constitution for holding elections or setting agendas or whatnot i just don't see any reason to expect anything but more of the same right now and i would love to be proven wrong by events especially by events more than by any of you but uh i think i've said enough to perhaps uh irritate you and so i'll stop talking here and if uh if you'd like to pose a question to me or the rest of the people uh i think we've got time for that