What Limits Government - part 2

 

How does limited government happen? 

Does voting limit government?  Do strong leaders limit government?  Does law limit government?  Does protesting limit government?  Does ideology limit government?

Mulling these over, and looking at the facts of history, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that nothing limits government.  

It doesn't matter which party is in control.

Government always grows.  Since about 4000 BCE, it has been, on average, growing and growing, never shrinking, never staying constant, growing faster and faster exponentially.

Yes, there have been wiggles and zig-zags in the line, but the general trend is growth, and exponential growth.

Like several other variables: the world human population, the growth of science and technology (Moore's Law), the economy, judged by several different kinds of measurements, etc., etc. - government always gets bigger, and does so exponentially. 

On closer inspection, there are things that "limit" government, in a sense, or cause it to shrink: the bubonic plague, in 1346-1352, for instance.  If a meteor or a gamma ray burst hit the Earth, that would probably cause government to shrink, in a sense, because it would cause these other variables to go down: the human population, the global economy, etc..  But if humanity manages to survive at all from one of these disasters, even these exogenous shocks are only temporary setbacks in the growth of the government.  In fact, if the Bubonic plague is a guide, after these tiny dips, government growth bounces back faster than other variables like population and scientific advancement - and when it comes back, it comes back in a new, more efficient, more powerful form that grows even faster and is even more difficult to shrink or limit.

One might as well inure oneself to it: the growth of government is a law of nature - if you like, a law of human nature.  To try to stop government from growing is as futile and thankless a task as trying to stop the tides, trying to stop magnetism, trying to stop gravity - or, indeed, trying to stop markets from forming.

Believe me, I'm not happy about this.  That there is no clear way to impede the exponential growth of government is inconvenient for silly, childish ideologies like those of the Austrian economic school, but it is equally repellent to the tradition I come from, that of people like Emma Goldman, Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Steve Ignorant, Jello Biafra, and so on.  Hell, for that matter, it also demonstrates the falsehood of Marxism, which always delusionally dreamed of the "withering away of the state."

This is not to say that political ideology doesn't matter.  No matter who wins the political contest, government gets bigger, with larger resources to expend.  But ideology the ideology of the victorious party can, at least to some degree, determine what that big government does with those resources.  And so that political contest matters.

But in any case, we can say- any attempt to deliberately limiting government's growth is hopeless, because government is that which does the limiting.  To have the power to limit government is to have a power that is greater than government.  But if such a power existed, that power would, de facto (and usually, eventually de jure) effectively be the government.

In practice, then, there is only one factor that limits the growth of government - the size of the economy which provides government its resources.  If the economy grows, the government will grow with it, as surely as night follows day.