Harold G. Vatter - The Rise of Big Government

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The Rise of Big Government in the United States

The Rise of Big Government in the United States

John F. Walker

Harold G. Vatter

First published 1997 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1997 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker, John F.
The rise of big government in the United States / John F. Walker
and Harold G. Varier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7656-0066-8 (alk. paper).
ISBN 0-7656-0067-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. United StatesEconomic policy. 2. United StatesPolitics and
government20th century. 3. Fiscal policyUnited States
History20th century. 4. Free enterpriseUnited States
History20th century. 5. Mixed economyUnited States
History20th century. 6. Industrial policyUnited States
History20th century. 7. United StatesForeign relations
20th century. I. Vatter, Harold G. II. Title.
HC106.W15 1997

330.97Sdc21	96-40286
CIP

ISBN: 978-0-765-60067-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-765-60066-0 (hbk)

For
Susan and Timothy Walker,
Asa Redmond, Simeon Redmond, and Andrew Culpepper

CONTENTS

While there is a vast literature on the growth of government in the United States, the contemporary attack on the public sector warrants an updated historical, comprehensive analysis of its roots and prospects. The present work undertakes this task.

The unfolding of this analysis brings out certain specific features of public-sector development that fill important gaps in existing treatments purporting to be comprehensive. In the first place, an analytical format is explicitly employed. This format connects evolving public programs and policies with their sources. Those sources are to be found in three basic historical currents: the private market systems evolution, changing social and ideological streams in the larger culture, and the history of international relations. The impulses emanating from these sources prompt people and their related organizations to press for government participation in human affairs.

To establish the connection between those impulses and the resulting governmental interventions requires an ongoing examination of relevant changes in these three sources of public action. This is one major contribution of the present work. An integration of source and response, therefore, is the focus of this analysis. The integration typically reveals the deep roots of a growing public establishment.

The markets technological advances, economic cycles, and wars, as well as the ratchet effects of leaps in public-sector size are integrated into what is viewed as more basic, long-run influences at work. Shorter-period developments simply bring to the surface precisely those long-simmering pressures impatient for expression.

No clearer example of this approach and its analytical cogency is available than an examination of the Great Depression of the 1930sthe founding decade of our mixed economy. Depressions in general reveal most starkly the human costs and the deficiencies of business enterprise in the private market system. There were depressions recurrently before the 1930s, some of themsuch as those of the 1870s and 1890swere quite severe in their impact on people and business. Why did the mixed economy of big government not result then? Was the social reaction to the 1890s stillborn? The answer is that societal and ideological hostility to such shocks, with its attendant public interventionist demands, had not yet ripened.

The severity and long duration of the 1930s Depression were the final stimulus needed to bring the interventionist process to fruition. Many elements of welfare interventionism and government responsibility for market system management set seed in the laissez-faire decades that then sprouted quantitatively and qualitatively during that grim period. There was no turning back; the economic shock revealed enormous long-run forces at work. No 1929 government bureaucracy, no great man president, could have executed such a devastating blow to laissez-faire, and the enormity of the turnaround ensured that more intervention was to come.

Until the 1930s and 1940s, a technologically advanced, high-income market system had been engendering a welfare state outcome, with a continuing need for more infrastructure and rectification of the ever more severe damage to the environment. This was happening in other industrial market economies as well, but in the United States international developments contributed a peculiar component to governments role. Historic anti-Sovietism eventuating in the Cold War gave a unique, chronic, superpower character to the American form of a mixed economy, supported by a public consensus. In contrast to other advanced market systems, the military establishment acquired the bureaucratic clout to constrain the welfare component of big governments expansion, particularly the public health element in the welfare state.

As a result, the American community did not confront the historical necessity for big government in such overwhelmingly civilian terms as did other countriesat least not until the Cold War subsided. The next welfare crisis is thus being generated in this last decade of the twentieth century.

All of these observations dictate this comprehensive survey of the major components of the burgeoning public sector. They also require careful treatment in this work of the relative growth contributions of the federal versus the state and local roles in the American federal system. A considerable effort is made to present in detail the widely neglected, administrative management component of governments growth. This is viewed as the chief contemporary expression of Wagners Law.

Finally, the book provides empirical and analytical support for the hypothesis that the sources responsible for governments continuing growth ensure its irreversibility. Reliance on irreversibility is viewed as primarily in the administrative management component, rather than in revenue-expenditure flows.

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