The Daily Chart: Crisis and Bankruptcy

One of the great books about the growth of government over the last century is Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan: Crucial Episodes in the Growth of Government. It explains and gives examples of the “ratchet effect,” whereby a crisis—a war, economic calamity, or . . . a pandemic perhaps—provides a reason for the expansion of government power and spending in response, but then the government never shrinks back to its old size after the crisis is over. And so government ratchets ever larger crisis after “crisis.”

Looks like Covid can be added to the data set:

Everyone knows that the U.S., and other leading industrial democracies, face a growing debt problem that may someday soon create an economic crisis, or at least kill economic growth. A new edition of Crisis and Leviathan will surely place Covid and its policy responses high among the examples.

Chaser—the GAO’s last report on government waste and fraud:

But remember—Elon Musk and DOGE are a threat to democracy.

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