Our concern over the size of government goes deeper than tax policy or the federal budget deficit. . Size flows from the problems with representation: representatives have an incentive to grow government because it enlarges the realm of their own power and gives them more resources from which to reward supporters. Ironically, Madison explicitly lobbied for largeness of population and landmass because he believed that largeness would protect America against the dangers of democracy. With hindsight, we can see America’s largeness would call forth a large and powerful government to govern it.
Additionally, because of the disconnect between citizens and their government, it is easier to see that bigness is itself a more basic threat to self-government than any specific policy or tool. The growth of government is a danger to self-government not because the state is on the verge of abrogating the constitution and installing a socialist junta, but because the raw size of the government crowds out private initiative and supplants opportunities for individual participation–and once individuals stop taking initiative, they will actually need a larger government to shore up an increasingly brittle civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville described this reciprocal cause-and-effect with remarkable and prophetic insight. “The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.” Tocqueville believed the growth of government, even if for benign purposes, was threatening to liberty because it subtly undermined the cultural underpinnings of a healthy democracy. “The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations.” Taking over retirement insurance, health care, the banking system or the auto industry isn’t just bad economics: it teaches people an unhealthy dependence on the public doll, which may then force the government to continue running private industry as people forget the skill of doing it themselves.
But government cannot recreate by fiat the culture of democracy that its own programs undermine. “A government, by itself, is equally incapable of refreshing the circulation of feelings and ideas among a great people, as it is of controlling every industrial undertaking.” The effort itself takes government beyond its rightful sphere. “Once it leaves the sphere of politics to launch out on this new track, it will, even without intending this, exercise an intolerable tyranny. For a government can only dictate precise rules. It imposes the sentiments and ideas which it favors, and it is never easy to tell the difference between its advice and its commands.”Once the government arrogates to itself the responsibility to nudge citizens into good behavior and foster good habits, it is acting less like a democratic government and more like a church—a church with armed police, tax collectors, and an army.
This is, Tocqueville believed, a new kind of oppression, different from the cruel tyrants of the ancient world. Despotism in America “would be more widespread and milder; it would degrade men rather than torment them.” American tyranny will not rob and kill people. It would be “absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle.” It appears benign, but has the subtly dangerous effect of engendering a culture of dependency. “It would resemble parental authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tried to keep them in perpetual childhood.” It grows so large and powerful that it does not just push out the private sector; it pushes out individual agency. “It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.” It does not kill men, but it does kill their spirits.
The all-powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a culture of dependency among individuals. It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism.”
The all-powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a culture of dependency among individuals. It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism.” Tocqueville feared the potential of the regulatory state to smother innovation and energy. “It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.” Big government undermines public-mindedness. “Administrative centralization only serves to enervate the peoples that submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish their civic spirit,” as Tocqueville put it.
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http://thefederalist.com/2014/02/21/how-tocqueville-anticipated-our-culture-of-dependency/
