Economics professor Richard Ebeling explains why government continues to grow apace in this essay.

Is there a solution? Ebeling writes, “It is neither an easy nor a quick task to change, in this sense, the ‘climate of opinion’ about the appropriate moral order to sustain a free, prosperous and ethically healthy society. But we have no tools other than our minds and our reason and an understanding that it is in our own self-interests to try.”

I agree entirely. The moral order of the United States has become increasingly accommodating to the kind of legal plunder that Bastiat warned about and the Founders tried to prevent by writing the Constitution as they did with strict limits on governmental power.