How Crisis Feeds the Leviathan
...I've been reading a book called The Regulators by Washington Post regulation reporter Cindy Skrzycki. This unsettling passage jumped out at me. Discussing the September 11 attacks, Skrzycki writes:
Indeed, the public's trust in government and the work of civil servants surged after the bombings to its highest levels since the 1960s. A Brookings Institution survey done in July 2001 showed that only 29 percent of Americans trusted government t odo what is right always or most of the time; by October, the number jumped to 65 percent. Several polls showed that public trust in government rose to levels not reached since the early Vietnam era.This is old news, of course. We all saw these polls. But in the context of discussing Higgs last night, the passage hit me again.
Think about it for a moment. Public trust in government jumped 150 percent in just three months, not in spite of, but because of the biggest, most colossal, most destructive failure of our government to do its most basic duty -- to defend us -- in the history of the republic....
