Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America's Families, Finances, and Freedom

By Joel J. Miller

Your right to pursue happiness has been revoked by Big Government.

Thousands of pages of regulations, millions of employees, and trillions of tax dollars . . . Big Government is bigger than ever, and as this bloated behemoth continues to fatten up and stretch out, it squeezes America's entrepreneurs, workers, and families - cutting our choices, limiting our opportunities, and squelching our right to pursue happiness.

Every year, taxes increase, regulations pile higher, the cost of living goes up - and our quality of life suffers. So with everyone obsessing about the obesity problem in America, isn't it time we looked at the fat, flabby, overstretched, and overbloated behemoth that is American government?

Size Matters shows through facts, figures, and head-spinning stories that as government increases in quantity, we all suffer a loss in life quality. Miller reveals the damning details of Big Government's impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. How it . . .

• reduces family income
• drives up the cost of housing, healthcare, and most every other consumer product or service
• hurts employment
• misdirects entrepreneurial efforts
• stifles vital marketplace creativity and innovation

Bristling with drama and data, Size Matters reveals the real daily drawbacks of Big Government. It comes down to this . . .

Big Government = Huge Problem. Size really does matter.

"Miller explains how government overregulation and porkbarrelling are costing Americans money and freedom while politicians and special interests line their pockets. This book should be a political call to arms."
-Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com; author of An Army of Davids

"Great sport! Imagine Thomas Frank if he actually told the truth. Accessible, entertaining, informative, and relevant in the best sense of the word. Read this book and you'll never lose an argument to a liberal again."
-Jack Cashill, author of Hoodwinked and Sucker Punch

"Miller will make you excited about the potential of America-and spitting mad that Big Government keeps tripping us up."
-Star Parker, author of Uncle Sam's Plantation

"Who knew that reading about rapacious government growth could be so delectable?"
-Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief, Reason

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Jan 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781418551735

Book preview

SIZE

MATTERS

PRAISE FOR JOEL MILLER’S PREVIOUS BOOK, BAD TRIP

. . . well-researched, bitingly written. . . .

—Publishers Weekly

. . . a powerful case against the drug war.

—Washington Times

Miller nails it.

—Larry Elder, ABC Radio

. . . a devastating examination. . . .

—Reason

. . . read this book and send a copy to every lawmaker and judge you know.

—Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Fox News

. . . a must-read for any concerned citizen.

—John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute

. . . should give even the most fervent drug warrior second thoughts.

—American Compass Book Club

"If ideological overdose caused our War on Drugs, Bad Trip is the stomach pump."

—Laissez Faire Books

. . . a humdinger. . . .

—Jan Mickelson, WHO Radio, De Moines, lowa

SIZE

MATTERS

HOW BIG GOVERNMENT PUTS THE SQUEEZE ON

AMERICA’S FAMILIES, FINANCES, AND FREEDOM

(AND LIMITS THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS)

JOEL MILLER

SizeMatters_0003_001

Copyright © 2006 by Joel Miller

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Nelson Current, a division of a wholly-owned subsidiary (Nelson Communications, Inc.) of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Nelson Current books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [e-mail].

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data on file with the Library of Congress.

ISBN 1-5955-5037-2

Printed in the United States of America

06 07 08 09 QW 5 4 3 2 1

To Ray and Virginia

The question is: more state or less?

—George Konrád, Antipolitics

Contents

Part I

Introduces the major themes of the book: Big Government, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, and the French-frying of America.

1. Of Beer and Bureaucrats

2. Pursuing Happiness

3. Road Signs and Guillotines

4. French-Frying America

Part II

Explains the roles of special interests, lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats in growing the size of government. Also gives preliminary consideration to how this affects the pursuit of happiness.

5. Growth Enterprise

6. Bigger Than Planned

7. The Age of Excess

8. Backroom Deals and Béarnaise Sauce

9. All Politics Is Product

10. Misadventures in Reinventing Government

11. Boom Years

12. Cinderella and the Fame Sluts

13. The Ambitions of Wonks and Hacks

14. Subletting Government

15. Calhoun’s Conundrum

Part III

Explores the many ways Big Government hampers commerce, stifles creativity, and blocks innovation, while also jacking up the cost of living.

16. Of Bubbles and Bungalows

17. Seeing Things

18. Enterprise in the Gas Chamber

19. Mr. Bureaucrat, Call Your Office

20. Bureaucratic Crib Death

21. Side Order of Stifling Regulations, Please

22. More Boot Than Bootstrap

23. Beast of Burdens

24. Bringing Down the Law

25. Do Not Pass Go

26. What’s Right with Kansas

27. Calcifying the American Dream

Part IV

Examines how proponents of Big Government push policies that limit individual choice in the name of the public happiness and end up encumbering government with too many tasks and individuals with too few opportunities.

28. Discount-Rack Happiness

29. A Softer Sort of Ham Fist

30. Pension for Folly

31. Pro-Choice

32. The Tyranny of Jam

33. Public Disservices

34. Think Small

35. Final Thoughts about Losing Weight

My Thanks

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Part I

Introduces the major themes of the book:

Big Government, the pursuit of happiness, the

rule of law, and the French-frying of America.

Imagine how happy we’ll be in a thousand years when we

have a hundred times as many laws to improve our lives.

—Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy

1 Of Beer and Bureaucrats

My first beer was Pete’s Wicked Pale Ale. It came with a green label that proclaimed its contents intensely hopped. I didn’t know what that meant until I took a gulp, but did I learn fast. Hops are bitter herbs that have been used to flavor beer for centuries. And pale ales are, according to the parameters of the style, extremely hoppy. That crisp, golden beverage was the most bitter substance I had ever tasted. I squinted and swallowed hard, but . . . wow!

I took another draught and my mouth was awash again in a riptide of bitter, bubbly, CO2 eruptions and the fruity splash of malted barley. What a sensation! I wasn’t sure if I liked it at first, but by bottle’s end I was a dedicated fan.

Soon I was reading books about the craft and history of beer-making, learning how different ingredients and brewing methods produced the wide array of beer styles available. I kept a tasting journal. I even partnered with a friend, invested in some equipment, and started brewing my own. It became a tremendous source of enjoyment and pleasurable recreation.

And Big Government almost botched it all.

Pete Slosberg is the brains behind Pete’s Wicked Pale Ale and the many other styles of beer his company produces, including its flagship brew, an Old World-style brown ale known simply as Pete’s Wicked Ale.

For Slosberg, brewing started as a hobby. When he decided to go commercial, he incorporated and applied for the requisite license from the California State Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

Denied.

Why? Because his beer was unsafe?

No.

Because he was using poor or illegal ingredients?

No.

The government refused him a license because Slosberg’s brewing equipment was borrowed. Because he didn’t own it. We were told by a bureaucrat there that it was absolutely not possible to use someone else’s equipment to make our beer, he recalls. The fact that an untold number of companies function only because they borrow and lease equipment apparently never crossed the minds of the bureaucrats, the state gatekeepers of commerce, innovation, and opportunity. We were trying to do something new that wasn’t on the prescribed list of official options, says Slosberg, adding a telling fact about the way bureaucrats think of fresh ideas: [I]f it’s not on the list, it must be prohibited.¹

But it didn’t end there. How could it? Brewing was what Slosberg wanted to do with his life. So he fought back, eventually prevailed, and received his license.

What if he hadn’t?

Pete Slosberg has been a big influence in the market for liquid refreshment—not only for legions of homebrewers like me but also for brewpubs and commercial craft brewers across the country. While much of that terrain was still uncharted, Slosberg and a few other small outfits like Anchor, Redhook, Bridgeport, and Sierra Nevada strode into the wild tangle like trailblazers, zymurgical Lewises and Clarks, mapping out the commercial possibilities for more diverse and interesting styles of beer than the domestic fare then available. If Slosberg hadn’t scored his license, the world of brewing would probably look much different than it does today.

I know my personal experience would have suffered—a little less flavor, a little less enjoyment, a little less fun.

And that’s a big problem.

Over the next several pages, I will lay out the broad themes of Size Matters: the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, and how Big Government undermines both.

For those that can’t wait, here’s the whole story in a sound bite: AS GOVERNMENT INCREASES IN QUANTITY, OUR LIVES DECREASE IN QUALITY. It’s not true in every instance, but it is undeniably true in most. The bigger government has grown, the greater squeeze it has placed on America’s families, finances, and freedom. And that squeeze has directly impacted the pursuit of happiness for the worse.

2 Pursuing Happiness

Of Thomas Jefferson’s famous triad in the Declaration of Independence, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, the most overlooked is certainly the last.

Scan through the indices and pages of several books about politics, law, and economics. You’ll find hardly a word about happiness—strange, because it’s nearly impossible to avoid similar references when reading the many speeches, letters, and essays of the founders’ day.¹ While life and liberty seem like weightier things, America’s framers placed a lot of importance on happiness.

As one pamphlet from the constitutional debates declares, The happiness of the people at large must be the great object with every honest statesman and he will direct every movement to this point.² In his 1776 essay, Thoughts on Government, John Adams says that happiness of society is the end [the goal] of government. . . .³ And Jefferson strikes the same chord in his first inaugural. After listing many benefits enjoyed by Americans, he asks,

[W]hat more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.⁴

The last phrase means to make our happiness complete.

When we talk about happiness, we usually mean something like long-term satisfaction or lasting pleasure and contentment with life. It might seem too vague or subjective to work as an organizing principle for government. But boil the issue down to a simple observation: People want to be happy and do the things they think will make them so. No man lives as he wishes unless he is happy, said dour old St. Augustine in The City of God, echoing sentiments held by previous thinkers as diverse as Aristotle and Solomon. Because happiness is a basic desire, pursuing it is simply what we do. This is true in every sphere of life: social, familial, political.

Jefferson and the founders thought of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as hierarchical. Happiness makes no sense if you’re dead, and you’re not free to pursue it if you have no liberty. They build on each other, much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The pursuit is stage three. As Daniel Nettle says, Jefferson’s rights one and two wake the horse up and open the stable door, but only number three—the pursuit of happiness—is going to make it go anywhere.⁵

It’s the great motivator—the thing that excites us in innovation and creativity, that compels us to marry and raise a family, that spurs us to productive work and leisure, that drives us to seek the good life. Even our acts of charity and religious devotion are tied up in happiness. What makes a man donate money and time to the poor except for the gratification of doing good and the added possibility of storing up treasure in heaven?⁶ At the more extreme end, what makes a martyr die for his faith instead of acquiescing to the demands of his executioners but hope of bliss in the Beyond?

The concern for any society is not that its people cannot or will not pursue happiness. They are hardwired to do so; they’ll find a way. Rather, the real concern is that their attempts will be frustrated. Happiness is not self-sufficient. As such, the founders reckoned it the duty of government to help its citizens in the quest.

Since that last statement is easily misconstrued, here’s a necessary clarification: Nowhere in the entire text of the Constitution is there an article or clause that says, Congress shall make people happy. Enabling one person to do whatever he thinks will make him happy might entail harming or defrauding his neighbor. It might also include something that would interfere with another person’s pursuit. And that would never float because government is supposed to remain neutral regarding the pursuits of its citizens.

As journalist William Leggett expressed the idea several decades after the founding, Governments have no right to interfere with the pursuits of individuals . . . by offering encouragements and granting privileges to any particular class of industry, or any select bodies of men, inasmuch as all classes of industry and all men are equally important to the general welfare, and equally entitled to protection.⁷

To avoid the same sticky wicket, neither did the founders recognize any supposed right to happiness itself. What we supposedly require to make us happy—the joy to which we theoretically have an overriding claim—might be another man’s property and livelihood. The founders would clearly grant no credence to such a right. And here’s an easy bet: Neither would you if you became the target of such a happiness.

The concept is really much simpler than all of that.

It meant that just as the rights to life and liberty were universal, so was the pursuit of happiness. The declaration is primarily a denial of the political principles which long governed Europe, said Oxford don C. S. Lewis, a challenge flung down to the Austrian and Russian empires, to England . . . and to Bourbon France. It demands that whatever means of pursuing happiness are lawful for any should be lawful for all.⁸

In a world riven by caste, class, mercantile interests, and legal monopolies, this was unheard of. Pursuing happiness was not the right of the wealthy and well-healed alone. In America, it was open to everyone, and that openness was guaranteed by the government.

Coupled with words like securing and pursuit of, happiness becomes a two-pronged concept in the American system, the words establishing different but complimentary roles for citizen and government:

Il_SizeMatters_0011_001 the right of individuals to pursue happiness

Il_SizeMatters_0011_001 the duty of government to protect that pursuit for all individuals

Each of us is at liberty to pursue those lawful endeavors that bring us joy and contentment, while the government is responsible to create an environment in which we can conduct our pursuits. That is the American way. The government provides security for general happiness, while we pursue our own specific, particular happiness.

Providing for general happiness is what the framers were getting at when they spoke of the general welfare or the common good. In the American scheme, the public happiness is not served by whatever a ruler merely deems good for everyone. It is only being served when government is doing things that genuinely benefit the entire community. By default, agents of the government must not then operate at the expense of one group or another. Neither must they use government to do those things that can be handled by other, better means. If superior, nongovernmental means for accomplishing a certain public good are available, having the government do it instead is poorly serving the happiness of the community.⁹

So here’s the big question: If we agree with the founders that the government’s job is to secure happiness and foster environments where its pursuit is possible, then what do we say when the government itself jeopardizes happiness and stands in the way of our pursuit?

3 Road Signs and Guillotines

While the founders considered happiness the number one job for government, they also knew that governments could be a barrier to happiness.

In a 18 August 1785 letter, Jefferson wrote about the difficulties of imagining how people with good climate, fertile soil, and genial rulers could produce so little human happiness. He laid the blame on one single curse—that of a bad form of government.¹

Before the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin argued that the strength and efficiency of any government in procuring and securing happiness to the people . . . depends . . . on the general opinion of the goodness of the government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors.² A bad government with daft and corrupt rulers will hardly secure the happiness of the citizenry.

But the problem may be broader and more systemic than that. In Federalist 62, James Madison explained that good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained. Some governments are deficient in both these qualities; most are deficient in the first.

Nothing makes this more evident than the French Revolution.

Within a few years of each other, America and France overthrew their respective monarchs.

America in 1776.

France in 1789.

While the initial rumblings across the Atlantic were well received by Americans, who were then in the early stages of founding the republic, the tidings turned grim. Soon there came reports of wholesale confiscations of property, mock trials, murders, and massacres. With Robespierre at the helm, what started with promise spun into chaos. By 1793, King Louie lost his head, and the Reign of Terror was the new boss.

France was beyond deficient in both of Madison’s categories required for good government. Arguably, happiness wasn’t a concern of the government at all. The French triad was

Reviews for Size Matters

[histreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Abortion aside, those on the political left who usually claim to be for choice, are proven not to be in this 2006 book by Joel Miller. But lest you think this is a partisan work, singling out Progressives, he takes more time to point out the short comings of Republican failures - from Nixon to Bush 43 - the author is likely a Libertarian. Wielding the quill-tipped sword, spilling ink, he slays sacred cows of Social Security, cartelization and other "Big Government" forms to remove choice from Americans and subtly stifle our quest for happiness.Illustrating his ideas with countless references to Founding Fathers and thinkers of their era to more contemporary economists, he begins by proving how equal justice by virtue of understandable common law for every citizen is lost when the the 2004 Federal Register totals about 75,676 pages! Even worse, non elected bureaucrats write and enforce regulations, their manual's (I use the term lightly) 147,639 pages measures to "more than twenty feet of shelf space." These are laws and regulations which hold us criminally responsible, even if there was no intent for malfeasance; the regulations add cost to business, and by virtue of obedience (for fear of penalty) divert money from growth or employee compensation.The second sections detail the "small" business owner. Readers familiar with Walter E. Williams will be familiar with the chapter on cabbies and hairbraiders who - working class people - are or nearly are kept out of the entrepreneur class by way of government regulations and unnecessary licensing. Mr. Miller elaborates on how government red tape works to inflate housing costs and drives residents from California and other high tax states.He writes in an enjoyable fashion, keeps the potentially dry information lighthearted and backs up his views with figures where necessary and quotes from myriad of sources. Mr. Miller deftly destroys Professor Barry Schwartz's notion that we are offered too many choices and are harmed by this mental torment. When Prof. Schwartz wrote in his book that he simply wished the Gap only sold one style of jeans, "the kind that used to be the only kind", Mr. Miller retorts "[m]ore choice doesn't mean less satisfaction. Rather more choice means less satisfaction for Schwartz." This ties in with Prof. Schwartz's op-ed piece against then-President Bush's idea to semi-privatize Social Security. Mr. Schwartz suggested options of alternative savings plans would overwhelm American's and make us unhappy. What it did was take away a choice, leaving a wide sector of citizens one choice... involuntarily contribute via payroll taxes to Social Security or live under minimum security.This is a book of limited government, removing lobbyists and reducing obscure and unfathomable law (both of which are used to benefit one group over another, thereby removing the equal protection notion of American jurisprudence) in an attempt to instill untethered personally directed pursuit of happiness as the Founders intended.