What happened to limited government?

American conservatives are nearly unanimous in their disappointment over the failure of President Bush and the Republican Congress to restrain the growth in government spending. In 1995, after the historic Republican takeover of Congress during the previous November elections, Republicans rarely held a press conference without mentioning the words "reduce the size and scope of government" and "move more power back to the states."

But then a serious of electoral disappointments assualted conservative Republican idealism. Republicans lost several seats in the US House of Representatives in the 1996, 1998 and 2000 November elections. Bob Dole lost the 1996 Presidential election to President Clinton. George W. Bush, espousing a political philosophy of "compassionate conservatism," lost of the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 Presidential election while Republicans lost five US Senate seats. These electoral setbacks convinced many Republicans that the public had a large appetite for government spending that Republicans would have to satisfy if they wanted to win elections.

In his column Respect the Limits that Made the USA, Karl Zinsmeister discusses the causes and effects of runaway government spending.

As 2005 closes, and the next year’s federal budget season opens, fiscal conservatives are up in arms. Though he talks a good line about battling government bloat, our current President has shown an eerie lackawanna when it comes to actually keeping a lid on the federal Pandora’s box. Quite apart from Katrina or the war on terror, there has been a pattern of troublesome spending spikes right from the beginning of the Bush Administration: Dubya’s 2001 education bill (“No Child Left Behind”) was the most expensive in history. His 2002 farm bill was the highest priced ever. His 2003 Medicare law was our most costly entitlement expansion. George Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill during his Presidency.

Zinsmeister offers a comparison between the United States and Europe in terms of the amount of government involvement in each of the two societies.

In the U.S., 17 percent of agricultural revenue currently comes from the government—a glum indication of how manipulated our farm sector is. But in the European Union, fully twice as much farm income—34 percent—comes from the state.

Ours has always been an extremely lightly ruled nation. At the turn of the twentieth century there were still only a total of 21,000 people working for the federal government in Washington, D.C. Even at the opening of George Bush’s Presidency, the U.S. federal apparatus remained smaller than counterparts in most other industrial nations by a third or more.

Our sharply limited government has been a central element of American distinctiveness and success. As one historical observer put it, the voice of Adam Smith “has been ringing in the world’s ears for years…but it is only in the United States that he is listened to, reverenced, and followed.”