At first that subject line seemed to make an interesting observation about how a large government might make compromise more difficult. But then I thought about it some more, and came to the opposite conclusion: Large government is the result of compromise. So maybe despising compromise makes a certain economic sense to some people.

Conservatives always blame large government and correspondingly-high taxes on an impulse to theft ("It's pure evil, I tell you!"), and quote the 19th Century Whig Whatsisname about how people in a democracy always find a way to "loot the treasury". Maybe, but it leaves hanging the question of why a free people would raise their own taxes. Everybody pays taxes, not just the rich; it's only the proportion that's up for political grabs, not the total.

Could it just possibly be that free citizens decided that an investment in government might bring tangible returns?

Don't try the slowly-boiling-the-lobster argument, not when the general public is reliably alerted to any and all tax increases, large or small, by the sound of Republican heads exploding messily all across this great nation of ours, spattering the states with Red gore. We're clearly aware of what we're doing.

The thing about compromise in a democracy is that it can contribute to the growth of government when a compromise results in multiple advocates getting what they want, instead of choosing only one. It's often the case that people are advocating different means to solve the same goal, and so the compromise is to try both and see which one works. 'Course, sometimes both programs become institutionalized, and it's hard to scrub away the accretion.

It's not that most people aren't aware of all the warts and blemishes of government, it's just that we're properly mindful of how much worse it could be. Winnie Churchill said "democracy's the worst form of government ...[pause, twinkle at audience]...except for all the rest [rimshot]". Sure your Nazis made the trains run on time, Lee, but at much too high a price. Most of us won't sell our souls for a clean, well-lighted State. Better a fat lazy government than an ambitious one, dontcha think?