The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain. - Thomas Jefferson


Sadly, Thomas Jefferson's quote at the beginning of this chapter was prescient. It doesn't matter that government fails and fails again; the politicians always want to do more. President Clinton received thunderous applause from Democrats and Republicans when he told Congress, "The era of big government is over." But since then government's only gotten bigger. As of this writing, 488,327 new pages have been added to the Federal Register since Clinton's speech. Every year, there is another spiderweb of rules for you to obey, and more taxes to pay. Government always gets bigger-under every administration-both parties. Republicans talk about shrinking government, but they've never done it.


How big should government be? It's not a question we normally ask. We should. America grew fastest when our government was small. From 1776 to 1915, government expenditures were less than 3 percent of gross national product. Is that the right amount? Or is 5 percent better? Ten percent? Even the Bible has a warning against that. The people of Israel demanded a king, but God warned against it: "This will be the manner of the king who shall reign over you: he will take your sons, and appoint them to him, for his chariots....He will take your daughters to be perfumers, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. He will take your fields, and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers" (1 Samuel 8:11-15).


A tenth? What kind of puny threat is that? Today, the sad truth is that government (federal, state, local) is about 40 percent of the economy. This is not what the founding fathers had in mind.


Today government runs trains, subways, schools, parks, public housing, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, a war on drugs. It subsidizes students, farmers, ranchers, Indians, researchers, volunteers, small businessmen, rich businessmen, and artists. It polices the world and, at home, polices our speech, jobs, schools, sports, and bedrooms. Maybe if it weren't doing all those things-badly-it would do a better job doing what it should do: like protect us from terrorists.


The founders said government should have limited duties. They laid it out in Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution: Government should keep the peace, coin money, establish a post office, postal roads, and the courts, and secure time-limited copyrights and patents. For 150 years, that's about all it did. The focus was on guaranteeing individual liberty.


In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt changed that. His New Deal decreed it was government's job to get people jobs, retirement benefits, and health care. Every administration since has expanded the New Deal's programs, and started new ones.


Economist Walter Williams says, "If you want to take all liberty away from all Americans, you have to know how to cook a frog." When a frog is killed by water heated slowly, he doesn't notice the rise in temperature. If it happened suddenly, he'd jump out. It's an apt metaphor. I mind the loss of freedom most, but since freedom is hard to measure, let's track the growth of government.


When America began, government cost every citizen $20 (in today's money) per year. Taxes rose during wars, but for most of the life of America, spending never exceeded a few hundred dollars per person. During World War II, government got much bigger. It was supposed to shrink again after the war but never did. Instead, it just kept growing. Now the federal government costs every man, woman, and child an average of $10,000 per year.


You probably don't know you pay that much, because the government is sneaky about how it taxes you. Paying withholding taxes each pay period dulls the pain of the income tax, and a hundred other taxes are hidden. For my special "John Stossel Goes to Washington," we followed St. Louis construction worker Bill Thurston and totaled the little-known taxes he paid as the day went by. It started with the tax on the electricity that powered the alarm clock that woke him. Bill paid two taxes on his toothpaste. He paid a sewer fee so the water could drain, and a tax on the water. Daring to drive to work cost him more. He pays personal property tax and sales tax on his truck. And when he buys gas there's a county gas tax, a state gas tax, and a federal gas tax.


At work, Bill's boss needs two employees just to calculate how much to withhold from paychecks. They make sure every employee pays local income tax, state income tax, federal income tax, FICA, and Medicare.


Because Bill's wife works as a nurse, the Thurstons pay a marriage tax of $1000 a year. Then there's grocery tax, property tax, utility tax, FCC tax, a county tax on cable TV, five taxes on the phone (line tax, local tax, municipal tax, county tax, state tax), and finally, a sin tax on the beer they drink.


Add it up, collectively Americans now pay more in taxes than we do for food, clothing, and shelter combined. Yet government keeps getting bigger. I fear nothing will stop Jefferson's "natural progress of things". Why does government keep growing? It's not just that politicians want more power. Representative democracy has a built-in bias toward increased spending.


Political scientist James L. Payne examined the record of 14 congressional appropriations hearings and found that of 1,060 witnesses who testified, only seven spoke against spending money, while more than 1000 testified in favor. Even a politician who believed in limited government would have a tough time resisting a constant onslaught of needy people saying, "This program is crucial."


The testimony is lopsided because of the "concentrated benefits--diffuse costs" problem: Benefits of government programs go to a few, but the costs are spread among many. If sheep and goat ranchers get $200 million in handouts, it costs each of us less than a buck. What are you going to do about that? Go to Washington and protest? I doubt it. For a buck, you probably won't even write your congressman, let alone take him out to dinner or give him a $2000 campaign contribution. Yet the sheep ranchers have an incentive to spend $199 million lobbying if it gets them $200 million back.


Economists call that "rent seeking." A 1987 advertisement in the Durango (Colorado) Herald spelled it out perfectly, telling readers why they should support a big federal water project: "Because someone else is paying the tab! We get the water. We get the reservoir. They get the bill."


That was remarkably honest, but this doesn't help America. It just makes government bigger. In the end, we all lose

- John Stossell

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This is our time to get it done!!