Gallup has been asking Americans the same question for about twenty years: is corruption widespread throughout the government?
This year, 89% said yes. It's the highest number they've ever recorded.
Take a look at the chart:
For two decades, it bounced around in the 70s. Then in the last couple of years it went nearly vertical. Republicans, Democrats, Independents—it doesn't matter. Almost nine out of ten of us now assume the people running things are not looking out for our best interests.
Which, honestly, is fair.
Back in 1987, a guy named Robert Higgs wrote a book called Crisis and Leviathan.
His argument is that government doesn't grow in a straight line—it grows in jumps, and every jump rides in on a crisis. A war, a crash, a pandemic, an attack—something frightening happens, everyone's scared, and in the fear the government reaches for powers it never had before.
Nobody argues because it’s an emergency and everyone is scared. The few people who do argue are quickly mobbed because their unwillingness to simply go along must mean that they want grandma to die.
Eventually, the crisis passes but, "although the ratchet is real, it does not restore the status quo ante." In plain English: when the emergency ends, government might shrink back a little—but never all the way. It settles at a new, bigger normal, everyone forgets it was ever smaller, and then the next crisis jumps it up again—this time from the higher floor.
Higgs called it the ratchet effect because it only turns one way.
Do that for a hundred years and you end up with a Leviathan—a government so enormous and so far into everything that 89% of the people it governs rightly observe that it is crooked. And how could it not be?
How could a federal entity this massive possibly answer to anyone?
How can it ever begin to shrink? It certainly has no incentive to shrink itself, and we’ve reached a point where no one person or group has the power to compel it to do anything. The only guarantee is that there will be another crisis. It doesn’t really matter if it is real or imagined.
We actually adapted Crisis and Leviathan into a book for kids.
The Tuttle Twins and the Leviathan Crisis—where the twins get sucked into a game of demagogues, fearmongering, Trojan horses, manufactured panic, and grabs for power. They learn what weapons regular people have in their arsenal to fight back against the Leviathan.
A kid who reads books like this learns to recognize the play while it's being run on them—to hear "this is an emergency, there's no time to think, just trust us" and, instead of panicking and blindly obeying, starts asking questions.
There's going to be another crisis.
There's always another crisis.
The only real question is whether the next generation hands over the keys as easily as the last few did.
— Connor
