Seven years ago on August 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing entitled, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” The memorandum noted that al-Qaida intended “to follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Youssef and ‘bring the lightning to America.’” The memo also noted “some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that … bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft …” George W. Bush read that memo and … did nothing. He went on vacation. Either he didn’t take it seriously, or he didn’t understand what he was being told, or he just didn’t care, but for whatever reason, he didn’t respond. At all. It is impossible to know whether any response might have effectively prevented or disrupted the attacks that occurred the following month. Maybe it could have, or maybe a responsible, urgent response to this warning wouldn’t have mattered. We’ll never know. All we can know is that what President Bush did — nothing — didn’t work. He didn’t even try. That should be George W. Bush’s epitaph. It should be carved on his tombstone and engraved above his official portrait: He didn’t even try.

…and so our troubles began.

These two philosophies have one thing in common, which is that they largely interpret everything in terms of individuals and the state, ignoring everything else in the equation. Similarly, they both see spheres of responsibility as exclusive (things must be either the individual’s right, or the state’s) rather than mutual.

Since the state doesn’t really have the option of letting society fail at a massive level, exclusivity of responsibility and the fact that all must be done either by individual or state means eventually that the state ends up picking up the pieces when things start to go round.

Libertarianism (here as laissez-faire economics a/k/a the Reagan years) leads to the nanny state because nothing else is available to act as safety net, and once the safety net is seen in such exclusive terms, the costs of running it become evident, and then there is pressure to reduce the costs of running it. This leads to the first part of the nanny state, pervasiveness, because it’s cheaper in the long run to have a society where the costs of running the nanny state are minimized.

The second part of the nanny state, bureaucratic incompetence, is driven largely by (in libertarianism and/or Reagan-style supply-side capitalism) a dislike of the functions of large government. This means both that competent people don’t go into government and also that careful, planned expansion is unlikely, things expand piecemeal in response to particular needs.

This is sort of an endless cycle, because the needs to drive costs down lead to piecemeal expansion of the government and the inefficiency means that large-scale measures to improve things (including saving money over the long term) never happen.

I think the way that socialism leads to the nanny state is more obvious, but I was genuinely surprised by the arguments that libertarianism would. For me, at least, the evidence seems to be there.

[edit: after publication, 'laissez-faire capitalism' was changed to the correct 'supply-side capitalism,' after reader comments. Whoops, teach me to write early in the morning.

It's also been suggested to me that this theory best applies to social programs, and not to overall spending and i did not make that sufficiently clear in the original post.]