First, that government within the United States tends to grow because there are more factors encouraging it than discouraging it. I'll list only a few and I'm sure others can do better: 1. We have 535 employees in Congress whose full-time job is the crafting of legislation. Not one of them is rewarded for cutting, revising, or ending legislation and hence they don't do it. 2. Central government is an easy place to collect money for people whose ideas can't be funded by themselves. 3. Central government is an easy place to leverage decision into action in the widest possible scope.
Against these three broad motivators there stands what? The limitation of government should be dictated by the finite amount of funds available and the resistance of the public to being tapped for more. But it isn't, and the reason that it isn't is that the ones allocating resources are allowed to allocate more than they have - the government is permitted to run a deficit. And one upshot of "progressive" taxation is that the entire public doesn't pay taxes where it's applied - income taxes most visibly. For them government spending is largesse - what possible reason would they have for limiting it?
This does not even address the fact that power is an aphrodisiac to those who have a little and they're far more likely to desire more than less. For the noblest of purposes, of course - as Webster said, "they mean to rule wisely, but they mean to rule."
Against these factors have been posed attempts at remedies - for one, a balanced budget amendment, for another, term limits for legislators. These have been rejected, (not all of the arguments against them being illegitimate, IMHO) and at best they'd be only partial remedies anyway. For example, term limits are useless if the ones allocating the resources are not elected at all - czars, anyone? But those relatively feeble gestures were just about all there has been merely to limit the growth of government, not actually to shrink it.
To shrink it, government employees are going to have to be let go and bureaucratic organizations are going to have to be eliminated. Naturally no one in these wants to lose his job and so resist those efforts with the aid of a labor union protecting their interests.
Short a broad-based political consensus in favor of these fiercely-resisted measures we will have what we have now: a few lone figures shouting what appears to me at least to be an undeniable truth and a vast crowd nodding their heads but unwilling to sacrifice their own bit of the system in order to shrink it. Historically the power of government has tended to shift around but not to decrease unless there is some sort of radical revolution in social construction that forces it. Our own structure of government allows for such a thing (many do not) but only if enough people press for it in terms that force the vested interests to divest. And at the moment there aren't enough people doing that to overcome all the institutional resistance and innate growth tendencies.
That certainly doesn't imply we need to stop calling for government reduction. We push for system reform or we experience system collapse. But it isn't going to be either quick or easy. Just some thoughts.
Reform is probably hopeless. The people are clueless. Devolved, soft, flabby, distracted, and utterly clueless. It’s amazing it’s still so livable, considering the circumstnces. The long train of abuses will roll on.