Ezra Klein writes:

A lot of conservatives believe, I think, that their philosophical preference for small government is counterbalanced by other people’s philosophical preference for big government. But that’s not true: Their philosophical preference for small government is counterbalanced by other people’s practical preference for larger government in certain areas where it seems to make sense.
And for all that, the conservative preference for small government is weaker than it might seem. The size of government increased under both George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Tax rates decreased, but at the cost of higher deficits, not lower spending. In fact, spending jumped as well, in no small part due to increases in military spending. And the military is part of government. The only recent president under whom government shrank was Clinton, and he was no small-government conservative. He thought government did some things well and other things poorly, and he tried to emphasize the former and cut the latter, and that made him, I’d guess, like most Americans.

I recommend Josh Green’s old essay on “Reagan’s Liberal Legacy.” The notion that conservatives unilaterally decided the course of government spending during the Reagan era is an interesting notion, but it’s not clear to me that it comports with reality. And George W. Bush, for all his faults, did preside over a mass-casualty terror attack in New York city, which prompted a bipartisan call for a large-scale military response in Afghanistan, and it shaped the environment for the Iraq debate. That certainly doesn’t excuse his domestic spending priorities, which should be judged on their own merits. I tend to think that ideas advanced by the Bush-era CMS and the president’s tax reform commission and his 2005 health reform proposal were very wise, yet were badly undermined by demagogic attacks. But I also think that he got many other things wrong. Either way, I’m not sure he should bear sole responsibility for all that transpired during his years in office.

Suffice it to say, I also don’t think that President Clinton’s abandonment of his 1992 Putting People First agenda reflected nothing but a series of insights regarding the changing shape of the international economic environment. Rather, I think it reflected a series of political accommodations with a Republican congressional majority, and deep interest in his own political survival. Declaring the “era of big government” to be over was an ideological statement, as many progressives of the time recognized.

I don’t have any theological views about the size of government. I do have a positive, as opposed to normative view, that the U.S. government is larger than it appears to be due to the role of tax subsidies and regulations. So we’d be better off if rid ourselves of the illusion that we have an unusually small government that could stand to converge with what we see in continental Europe. I tend to think that the public sector would profit from greater spending discipline, and more clarity regarding its goals across different domains. I also think that sluggish wage growth gives us good reason to restrain growth in the tax burden, which in turn gives us good reason to restrain growth in the spending burden. My sense is that these views are shared by many conservatives, including grassroots conservatives who are alarmed at the prospect of seeing their tax burdens increased to accommodate existing spending, let alone any planned increases.