ndrosen

Well, there were parasites in the old days of Tammany Hall, when people paid hundreds of dollars to become policemen, and thousands of dollars to become judges, and not just to collect their official salaries. No doubt you’re right that it wasn’t just one bad decision, but other bad decisions were downstream of an original set of bad decisions. Georgist tax reform at least might have averted the Great Depression, or made it less severe, and then there might not have been so much of a perceived need for the federal government to do something, which turned into a number of questionable somethings, and set the stage for further expansions of government under Lyndon Johnson and his successors, until now neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are even pretending to run on fiscal responsibility and limited government, but merely arguing over who should receive plenty of largesse from the government, and which side the administration should favor in various culture wars.