Americans are losing trust in government by Glenn Harlan Reynolds  in USA Today February 11, 2013

Excerpt:

New York Times blogger Nate Silver — best known for his prescient election projections in 2012 — matches up the data on distrust of government with the numbers reflecting increasing government spending on welfare (“social insurance”) programs, and makes this observation:

“The declining level of trust in government since the 1970s is a fairly close mirror for the growth in spending on social insurance as a share of the gross domestic product and of overall government expenditures. We may have gone from conceiving of government as an entity that builds roads, dams and airports, provides shared services like schooling, policing and national parks, and wages wars, into the world’s largest insurance broker. Most of us don’t much care for our insurance broker.”

Government used to do big things with obvious relevance to the public good. Now it takes money from A, and gives it to B. That could be part of it.

There’s also the fact that the sheer size of the government makes it hard to do anything well. Often two different parts of the government pull in different directions — subsidizing cheese, say, while simultaneously telling us to eat less fat. The bigger the government, the more likely we are to see these kinds of problems.

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