There is a popular conception among some libertarians that the reason that we live under a massive welfare-warfare state is because government has a natural propensity to grow. The notion is a popular one among libertarians who promote anarchism, i.e., the total absence of government. The argument goes like this: The Constitution, which was supposed to keep government reined in, has proven to be a worthless document because government is a cancerous blob that inevitably grows of its own accord, rendering constitutional restraints meaningless.
The cancerous blob argument, however, is fallacious. In fact, it is really just a way to avoid confronting a discomforting reality: that the reason that we live under a massive welfare-warfare state is not because government is a cancerous blob but rather because Americans of our time have chosen socialism. Unfortunately, that includes some libertarians.
Consider the first 100 years or so of American history. From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, Americans lived under a political-economic system that had no income taxation, IRS, Federal Reserve, immigration controls, drug laws, Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, welfare, minimum-wage laws, paper (i.e., fiat) money, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, and most of the federal departments and agencies that exist today.
If government was a cancerous blob that grew of its own accord, then we would have expected it to have a minor income tax and a small IRS and a small welfare state within the first 10 or 20 years of the nation’s existence, which would then have progressively grown and grown into a massive welfare-warfare state by the late 1800s.
