After more than a year of praising hope and change and all things Obama, The Economist awakens and finds “Leviathan stirs again“:
Today big government is back with a vengeance: not just as a brute fact, but as a vigorous ideology.
Labour in the U.K. and the Obama administration both take their share of body blows (so, for that matter, does excessive spending shepherded by Bush 43 and the GOP Congress of the previous decade). The editors also pay tribute to the Tea Party movement and how it helped elect Scott Brown to the Senate. Moreover,
The level of public spending is only one indication of the state?s
power. America?s federal government employs a quarter of a million
bureaucrats whose job it is to write and apply federal regulations.
They have cousins in national and supranational capitals all round the
world. These regulators act as force multipliers: a regulation
promulgated by a few can change the behaviour of entire industries.
Periodic attempts to build ?bonfires of regulations? have got nowhere.
Under Mr Bush the number of pages of federal regulations increased by
7,000, and eight of Britain?s ten biggest regulatory bodies were set up
under the current government.
Other than a bizarre call for continued state activism to prevent catastrophic global warming (some habits die hard), this is a terrific analysis of why the resurgence of big government is destined to fail.
