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About the book Crisis and Leviathan

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Contents:

Introduction:

Governments may begin modest and limited but not remain that way. This has been the case in the United States. In size and scope, the federal government over the decades has grown enormously. Thomas Jefferson said that “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Why?

The reason can be reduced to one word: crisis. Emergencies, real or otherwise, create conditions ripe for coercive government response. This means not simply ad hoc temporary responses intended to get past an emergency, but permanent institutional changes that expand government power, transfer control of resources from private owners to “public” authorities, and diminish the scope of individual liberty.

In each war the U.S. government not only raised taxes, but it also assumed significant control over peaceful economic activities and private property. Shooting wars were not necessary to accomplish this same result. Preparation for war has also precipitated the expansion of political power over society. Military crises have not been the only boost to power. Economic emergencies have play the same role. Most notably, the Great Depression brought the New Deal (which in fact, if not in name, began under Herbert Hoover), a series of measures that imposed government on all aspects of economic life.

Crises provide fertile ground for the growth of government because national political leaders are uniquely able to appear to respond on behalf of the entire population with highly visible measures ostensibly calculated to eliminate the threat and hardship. Government can raises taxes to finance an army to defend against an apparent enemy. Or it can launch large-scale programs to relieve mass unemployment and loss of income. Once people believe that government can counteract crises (which often are of the government’s making), their relationship with the state radically changes. Government is now seen as savior. Thus the United States changed from a place where government was small and the scope of individual liberty large to one where power exercised in the name of “need” takes precedence over freedom. Political leaders may see the potential that crises hold for expanding their power and may exploit actual crises or even create them in order to assume greater authority and prestige.

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