The Era of Small Government Is Over

Is there any hope to check the growth of the state?

- By Eric Boehm

It was a full quarter-century ago when President Bill Clinton delivered one of the few quotable State of the Union addresses in American history.

“The era of big government is over,” he proclaimed on January 23, 1996. It was more of a political statement than a policy goal—indeed, Clinton proceeded to spend the next hour outlining a long list of things the federal government ought to do. But it wasn’t just a bumper sticker catchphrase. “We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem,” he explained. “And we have to give the American people [a government] that lives within its means.”

That succinct conception of limited government likely would, if expressed today, make any Democrat effectively unelectable—at least on the national stage. For that matter, the idea that Americans would be able to help themselves best if government got out of the way would place Clinton, circa 1996, outside the emerging mainstream consensus of today’s Republican Party. Acknowledging the limits of government power to improve people’s lives and worrying about the cost of a large and growing government is, it seems, so last century.