from National Review, How American Government Became Encrusted with Subsidies by George Will:

Excerpts:

Madison counted on conflict, but gargantuan government is, because of its jungle-like sprawl, mostly opaque. So there is what Weiner calls “dissipation of conflict.” And Weiner suggests that this, which enables minorities to feed off the inattentive majority, is the result of what Madison thought would inhibit abusive majorities — the size of what Madison called an “extensive” republic.

His revolution in democratic theory was this: Hitherto, it had been thought that if democracy were at all feasible, it would be so only in small polities. Factions were considered inimical to healthy democracies, and small, homogenous societies would have fewer factions. So, Madison favored an extensive republic because it would have a saving multiplicity of factions. They would save us from tyrannical majorities because all majorities would be impermanent coalitions of minorities. For a century now, Weiner writes, the national government has been hyperactive in distributing economic advantages to attentive but inconspicuous factions. This will not stop. Why?

If Americans devoted their lives to mastering the federal budget’s minutiae, gargantuan government might behave better. But what economists call the “information costs” of such mastery would be much higher than the costs of just paying the hundreds of billions that the subsidies cost. There is a name for what this fact produces: demosclerosis.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422584/government-growth-subsidies-sclerosis

 

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