Toynbee on the growth of government

From A Study of History:

A classic example of this necessity of stepping ever farther into an ever-widening breach is afforded by the administrative history of the Roman Empire during the two centuries following its establishment. The Roman secret of government was the principle of indirect rule. The Hellenic universal state was conceived of by its Roman founders as an association of self-governing cities with a fringe of autonomous principalities in regions where the Hellenic culture had not yet struck political root. The burden of administration was to be left to these local authorities. This policy was never deliberately revised; yet, if we resurvey the Empire at the end of two centuries of the Roman Peace, we shall find that the administrative structure has been in fact transformed. The client principalities have been turned into provinces, and the provinces themselves have become organs of direct and centralized administration. The human resources for the conduct of local government gradually ran dry, and the central government, faced with this increasing dearth of local administrative talent, found itself constrained not only to replace client princes by imperial governors but to put the administration of the city-states into the hands of appointed ‘managers’. By the end of the story the whole administration of the Empire had passed into the hands of a hierarchically organized bureaucracy.

Toynbee explains the growth of governance (and authoritarian control) as the "necessity of stepping ever farther into an ever-widening breach".

We have an ever-widening breach. The attack on the Capitol was fruit of that poisonous tree. There is a lot of focus on that attack, and a lot of fret. All the focus is on the January 6th result of the breach. None of the focus is on the cause of the breach, which to my mind is the unrelenting decline of the US economy, and on the failure of Democrats even to acknowledge that decline.

A lifetime ago, FactCheck.org evaluated President Trump's inaugural address; I wrote about that evaluation on my old blog. The Google hit that led me to FactCheck said, in part:

in his inaugural address, Trump portrayed the United States as a nation in decline, ...

That got me interested, because I also "portray" the United States as a nation in decline. Here's the summary of my critique of the FactCheck article:

FactCheck tells us that inaugurals usually serve up "broad platitudes and generalities". So we should expect the wording of the Trump inaugural to be broad and general. But FactCheck takes great schools, safe neighborhoods, and good jobs, filters them through the word "carnage", and gives us only "crime". FactCheck takes a focus on jobs and flushes it down the toilet by suggesting that we have all the jobs we need. And FactCheck takes a focus on improving our economy and reduces it to "welfare".

The FactCheck response is incorrect.

They were critical of Trump, so to my mind their view serves as part of the Democrat's response. But the response, the FactCheck response, was to get crabby because Trump "portrayed the United States as a nation in decline".

This is the graph I used in my old post:

The Long-Term Decline of Real GDP Growth

Our economy is in decline. Going by the black trend line, our economic performance fell from better than 4% annual in 1948, to less than 2% annual in 2013. Half the growth we had when our economy was good has been lost in a lifetime.

Republicans talk about making government small enough you could "drown it in a bathtub". But the problem is not that our government is too big. The economic problem is not that our government is too big. We could have bigger government or smaller government, I don't really care. Changing the size of government will not fix the economic problem.

We have to fix the economic problem. This problem, the economic problem, is the source of our "ever-widening breach".