Why the Era of Big Gov't Is Finished

President Bill Clinton famously, infamously if you are one of my very few, dear, progressive readers, declared in his 1996 State of the Union, "The era of big government is over." (Progressives never forgave him.)

Now, "National Conservatives," semi-hostile toward free markets, yearn for us to return to an era of Big Government. Do We, the People, share the NatCons' Big Government yearnings?

Doubtful. Americans are much too fun-loving.

Dictatorships are the biggest kind of big government. The Washington Post's Editor at Large Robert Kagan posits to much notice that "A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable."

Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., promoting her new book "Oath and Honor," tells NBC that "A vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in ..." The New York Times explains "Why A Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than the First."

All nicely wrapped up by The Washington Post's Ishaan Tharoor's "The fear of a looming Trump dictatorship." The fun-loving Trump dismisses that fear.

As reported by The New York Times, "Pressed by Sean Hannity to promise not to abuse power, Donald Trump agreed he wouldn't, 'other than Day 1,' adding: 'We're closing the border. And we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator.'"

Hope not! Shortly before Trump's loss of the presidency in 2020, I speculated here about "The End of Republican America, Dawn of a Trump Imperial Dynasty?":

"Trump. Donald, Melania, Ivanka, Donald Jr., Eric, Lara, Tiffany. The cavalcade of Trumps during the Republican National Convention conjures up the fantastic possibility of an imperial Trump Dynasty."

"Impossible? Tell it to the Romans.

"As Jason Daley wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: "The U.S. Constitution owes a huge debt to ancient Rome. ... Leaders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison read the historian Polybius, who laid out one of the clearest descriptions of the Roman Republic's constitution, where representatives of various factions and social classes checked the power of the elites and the power of the mob. ... 

"Rome, whose 482-year-long Republic, bookended by several hundred years of monarchy and 1,500 years of imperial rule, is still the longest the world has seen."

America then went on to seed what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire of liberty." Thirteen isolated and weak former colonies radically fomented small-l liberal small-r republicanism in a world ruled throughout history by kings and emperors. America subverted the imperial world order.

Goodbye to the Austro-Hungarian, Chinese, Russian, and Ottoman empires! The fifth and least authoritarian, the British, went into terminal decline.

I contend that we Americans with intentionality grew our itty-bitty federal government to take down even bigger governments. How itty-bitty?

Drawing from history I wrote at CNBC about a decade ago:

"The federal government spent $15 billion from 1789-1900. Not $15 billion a year. $15 billion cumulatively. Uncle Sam will spend $10 billion a day in 2011. The federal government spends more every two days than it did altogether for more than America's first century.

"Although these sums are not adjusted for inflation they give a correct impression of the magnitude of the change from what our Founders set forth and our early statesmen delivered."

America built our little federal government into a big (if far shallower than many of its skeptics believe) state to take down much bigger governments: the empires and the ensuing tyrannies of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, imperial Japan, the Communist USSR, and People's Republic of China. We moved the world toward liberty.

Good investment! Yet Uncle Sam now spends far, far more than in 2011.

Profligate spending is a bad habit! As the House conservatives complain, now is the time to scale spending down, not up.

Big Government, inherent in a dictatorship, would be terribly expensive. I doubt that America has an appetite for higher taxes or even more national debt.

The specter of authoritarianism is haunting Europe. But America is better than that.

As Richard Rahn, chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, insightfully observes in The Washington Times:

"The American Founders made the people, rather than rulers, supreme by using a decentralized, bottom-up governance model. In 1800, Russia (including much of Ukraine) had a population seven times that of the U.S.

"Now, the U.S. has a growing population that is almost double that of Russia and Ukraine combined and an average income about five times as high. Russia is no longer a population or economic giant among nations, and each year, its relative importance diminishes."

And American importance continues to grow. Sorry NatCons, we regular folk prefer prosperity to an expensive hegemony.

Despite Donald Trump's vitriolic rhetoric, and despite those around Trump who seem to covet a slice of dictatorial power, it is improbable that the American people will tolerate a serious claim to dictatorial power ... or the foundation of an imperial dynasty.

The era of Big Government really is over.

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.