American Exceptionalism & the Decline of Limited Government

Via Megan McArdle, a sentence to ponder from Tyler Cowen:

One implication [of this book] is that the United States kept “small government” for an artificially long period of time, due to North-South splits and the resulting inability to agree on what a larger government should be doing.

I suspect there’s something to that. The realignment of American politics over the past 40 years has created coherent parties that, while disagreeing on the details, agree that the Federal government needs more power. Republicans may pay lip-service to federalism but their record in office tells a different story. It was a Republican President (George W Bush) that gave new powers to a federal department of education his party once wanted to abolish and a Republican Congress that passed a major new prescription drug benefit for seniors and it was a Republican-run Department of Justice that, inter much alia, consistently violated the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.