Government Fails, Long Live Government!

摘要

Recent decades have not been kind to believers in big government. At the beginning of the modern era, they wrote Utopian novels about how society would be excellently managed when government took over everything. Or they drafted manifestos that implicitly assumed that the State (Marx capitalized it) had the ability to redeem mankind once the right people were put in charge. A handful of conservatives and libertarians questioned this enthusiasm, but they were ignored. Mainstream opinion assumed that government was an effective and responsible problem-solving machine. The result has been big government that fitfully grows bigger each decade.