Americans are losing trust in government: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

Last week, I noted that Americans are losing confidence in their government: According to a new Pew poll, more than half see it as a threat to their freedom. That's a troubling number. But why have things gotten so bad?

Well, perhaps it's because government actually has become a bigger threat to freedom. There's plenty of support for that notion, given that we're seeing everything from TSA scanners, to widespread surveillance, to drone strikes on American citizens. Add to that the creepy sound of "Homeland Security," and now talk of gun control or even gun confiscation, and it's easy to see why lots of people, with lots of different political views, might come to see the government as a threat.

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.

Nobel-prize-winning economist Ronald Coase made that point in a 1998 interview:

"When I was editor of The Journal of Law and Economics, we published a whole series of studies of regulation and its effects. Almost all the studies -- perhaps all the studies -- suggested that the results of regulation had been bad, that the prices were higher, that the product was worse adapted to the needs of consumers, than it otherwise would have been. I was not willing to accept the view that all regulation was bound to produce these results. Therefore, what was my explanation for the results we had? I argued that the most probable explanation was that the government now operates on such a massive scale that it had reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up. But that doesn't mean that if we reduce the size of government considerably, we wouldn't find then that there were some activities it did well."

A government limited to relatively few things -- visible things, obviously relevant to the common good -- can probably do those things well. As a consequence, it is likely to be trusted and admired. A government that tries to do a lot of things, on the other hand, will probably do them badly and be less highly regarded.

The problem, of course, is that a government that does a lot of things badly is more appealing to the political class: more opportunity for graft, and for exercising the inflated self-importance that probably drives politicians even more than graft. The question is whether the government exists for the country's benefit, or for the benefit of the political class. At present, the answer to that question is depressingly clear.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

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