what are the reasons of all level of the gov't growing tremandously over the past 100 years?

Question

do you see it reversing the whole process sometimes in the future?

Answer 1

The government feeds on itself. You build a prison and pretty soon the prison guards are dictating what they need instead of the people. You hire a cop and pretty soon they are dictating to you the same. As they grow, they become more powerful making demands and receiving compensation and pensions which far out weight the private sector.

Lawyers don't help either. Even in the private sector, they are non-value added. In the public sector they are even worse because they make the laws which provide themselves with more and more jobs and income.

It is a vicious circle.

Answer 2

Ronald Reagan once said the closest thing to eternal life is a government program.

The Depression saw the greatest expansion of government. For the first time, it was deemed acceptable for the government to intervene in affairs usually deemed unacceptable. This is especially true in areas of finance. But even public works was considered something for the states to work out.

FDR was revered as a god. While The Depression lasted until about 1937, the double-whammy of WWII and his subsequent death more or less ensured the Democratic party held sway of Congress for about fifty years.

With JFK's martyrdom, the ol' Texas back-slapper, LBJ was able to force through a huge amount of government spending called the Great Society. Medicare, Medicaid, welfare subsidies, etc. Thusfar about $2,000,000,000,000 has been spent in this effort to make us a socialized country and none of it has worked.

I digress. When you take into account that the dynamic and expectations shifted of what the government should do after FDR (Ike being the only one who abstained)... the government has grown. LBJ really ballooned it. But even Reagan, who cut taxes and improved the economy, allowed the government to grow.

The other problem is that civil service jobs became unionized and expected for life. Bureaucracies are created constantly with an alphabet soup of names. Like Topsy, it just grows.

If you want to understand why the government grows, look to the Soviet model and see what happened there. While not perfect, it makes for a good understanding of how a command economy makes for a big-*** government.

I am also grossly generalizing. Just wanted to point you in the right direction.

Answer 3

Why has the government increased in size? Because people want somebody to take care of them and someone to blame when things go wrong. Look at the great depression, look at all of the government programs that came out of that. Look at Hurricane Katrina and now they had somebody to blame.

The process is not going to reverse itself and the government is only going to get bigger. Especially with the increase in the terrorist threat.

Answer 4

Special interest campaign contributions. Politicians are more responsive to who pays them than who elects them. The entire system of donating money to elections makes voting meaningless. Over half the voting population doesn't vote.

People who are represented by the politician are the only ones who should be bribing that politician. People, not groups. Only people can vote, not groups.

This will remove special interest lobbest from Washington DC. They can still talk, but who will listen? Politician only listen to people who pay them. People represented by the politician must be the only ones donating money to that political campaign.

Bring this up to your politician and see if they will change. If they say the money from special interest doesn't affect their judgement, then taking it away won't matter to them either.

Why else are special interest groups giving money to politicians? They want something for their money. Every new program requires extra spending. Extra spending going to contractors, business, unions....Someone is getting this money.

Answer 5

Self-serving politicians & bureaucrats...
Voters discovered that certain self-serving unscrupulous politicians would raid the public treasury and return the money to unscrupulous citizens in exchange for votes..
This is the backbone of the Democratic Party...
There seems to be no way of reversing this trend...

Answer 6

the same reason the pres. has a cabinet, b4 we had pres. we had kings and most ppl felt that 1 person shouldnt have that much power and/or responsibility, and then there was good ol democracy! Hopefully the government doesnt deplete or all that work would just be goin down the drain.

Answer 7

Meeting growing need and demand. No, it'll keep growing. Most programs are popular to someone, or in their because a politician is bought off. It's difficult to remove programs, and even hard to reduce them. You might get a bit of it, but it will be resisted, on either moral or greedy grounds.

Answer 8

The population grew. Government grows and shrinks to fit the people it serves.

Answer 9

It all started with FDR's great little plan called "The New Deal"... it set into motion our current large-government oversight, suck off the teat of the welfare system mentality.

Answer 10

To grow along with our constantly growing population. More people means more social services.