The tradition of distrusting government—almost any government—has such deep roots in the American past that a newcomer could justifiably think of the United States as a nation of a quarter of a billion near-anarchists. After all, it was Tom Paine, a major voice of the American Revolution, who declared that “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Is Paine too radical for you? Try, then, a congressman in the First Congress: “[All] governments incline to despotism, as naturally as rivers run into the sea.” Or President Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural: A “wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another…[and] leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits is the very “sum of good government.” Or our national sage, Emerson, some years later: “The less government we have, the better.”

One could go on indefinitely netting sentiments like these from the mainstream of American discourse. Yet for a people who seem to be inherently skeptical of government, we have, after two centuries of national existence, an unbelievably generous amount of it. Even those of us who have friendly—or at least explanatory—words to say on behalf of “big government” can’t deny the gargantuan size of the creature. A glance at the federal establishment alone, which usually provokes the loudest critical outcries, is sobering. A handy Information Please Almanac informs me that at the end of 1991 the total number of civilian federal employees, rounded off to the nearest thousand (a practice that we shall follow throughout this excursion), was 3.103 million. Their payroll for the single month of October (likewise in round numbers) was $9.687 billion. State and local governments left those numbers in the shade; they employed 15.455 million workers and paid them, in the same month, more than $31 billion.

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