Why people hate government

October 18th, 2012 by admin

By Barry Bluestone | Boston.com | October 7, 2012

In 1965, according to a national Gallup Poll, 35 percent of Americans considered “big government” to be the biggest threat to the country in the future. Slightly fewer (29%) named “big business” as the biggest threat while just 17 percent put this onus on “big labor.” This was the era of Lyndon Johnson and the federal government’s massive “War on Poverty.”

By 1983, fully 50 percent of those polled listed big government as the biggest threat with only 20 percent naming either business or labor. This was the era of Ronald Reagan and the mantra “Get the Government off my back.” By 2001, at the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency and “compassionate conservatism,” the Gallup poll revealed that two-thirds (65%) of Americans were most worried about big government. By contrast, less than a quarter (24%) feared big business and only 8 percent now worried about big labor.

Last year, in the third year of the Obama presidency, Gallup asked the same question and the results were largely unchanged from 2001. Two-thirds — 64 percent – still believed government posed the greatest threat to the future of the country. Despite the Great Recession, brought on in large measure as a result of the financial shenanigans of some of the largest banking businesses ever assembled on earth, only 26 percent of Americans believed business was the greatest threat to the country’s future.

Why the continued distrust and fear of government? It is mainly due to “asymmetrical information” and the lack of a serious education campaign about what government actually does for every last one of us every single day. Essentially, we take for granted what local, state, and federal agencies take care of as a matter of course and rarely consider that the stop light at the next corner was put there and maintained by a local government agency, that our safe drinking water was provided for and guaranteed by a multi-billion dollar state government investment, and that our life expectancy has increased by nearly ten years since the end of World War II mainly due to medical research funded by an array of federal programs.

A good experiment you might try is to keep track of all the things government does for you during a single 24-hour period. Even before you wake up on that day, a government inspector has assured you that your bedroom mattress will not cause you harm. Within the first hour, you will have clean water for your shower, sewers for your waste, and cornflakes for your breakfast that are not only safe but delivered to you along federal interstate highways, state roads, and local streets. And that’s all before 9:00 AM.

During the day, the federal government alone (not counting what state and local governments are doing) is working in the background on an enormous array of programs that benefit us in countless ways. For the sake of brevity, here is a short list of federal programs by function:

Provide for the National Defense