In actuality, government is taking more than a third today because our accounting is not fully reflecting the huge over-commitments in Social Security and Medicare. According to a recent paper by economists from the Cato Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, we'd need a payroll tax of 14.5 percent, more than double the current tax, to cover these obligations.
Along with the growth of government, there has been a dramatic shift from local and state control to the federal government.
At the beginning of the last century, 70 percent of government spending was at the state and local level. Today, almost two-thirds of government spending is at the federal level.
All of this means two things. First, a large portion of our lives today is politicized and run inefficiently. One of the reasons that our free economy works so well is that businesses change as times change. But once a government program starts, entrenched political interests make change almost impossible. Consider President Bush's aborted effort to fundamentally reform Social Security.
Second, people feel impotent as their lives are increasingly controlled by distant bureaucrats and monolithic government programs.
In the same Times/CBS poll, 45 percent of 17- to 29-year-olds said they would have less influence and 18 percent said they would have more influence than older people in picking the next president. Is this not ironic in a time of the Internet, primaries and campaign-finance reform?
So is Rome and decline in the cards for us?
I think we'll be OK if we don't forget how we got successful and what drives failure. Our success has come from freedom and letting individuals take responsibility for their own lives. But failure comes when we lose the humility required of freedom and turn to prideful notions that we can design government programs that solve life's problems.
For guidance here, we must turn not to history but to Proverbs.
"Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall."