[wyager]

> The growth of government is a direct response to constant abuses at the hands of smaller local government, corporations, and wealthy individuals.

Or maybe it's a direct response to the fact that the people who have the power to grow the government also work for the government and are therefore incentivized to grow the government.

Which idiot is going around saying "wow, this one level of government sucks, I'd better give more money and power to a slightly different level of government"?

I think you're also wrong that local governments are frequently committing abuses; the federal government seems to do that much more frequently (possibly by nature of its tremendous scope), and has an approval rating to match.

[ctrl_freak]

> I think you're also wrong that local governments are frequently committing abuses; the federal government seems to do that much more frequently

I think I read a study not too long ago that indicated state and local governments actually had much higher corruption than the federal government. I tried to find it now; the best I could come up with was an article from nymag [1]. It's an interesting read, and one of the interesting tidbits it notes is that state house elections track US house elections with a correlation of 0.96, in other words, much less accountability at that level. Perhaps one of the reasons why the federal government seems more abusive than local governments is that it gets more media attention.

[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/ferguson-worst-...

[braveo]

I would agree with that, but I think a large reason for it is because people don't pay attention to local as much as federal anymore, so it slips under the radar a lot.