Killing us with kindness.

• Author: Voegeli, William
• Position: National Affairs - Social welfare

FOUR YEARS AGO, I wrote a book about modern American liberalism: Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State. It addressed the fact that the U.S.'s welfare state has been growing steadily for almost a century, and now is much bigger than it was at the start of the New Deal in 1932, or at the beginning of the Great Society in 1964. In 2013, the Federal government spent 2.279 trillion dollars--$7,200 per American, two-thirds of all Federal outlays, and 14% of the gross domestic product--on the five big program areas that make up our welfare state: Social Security; all other income support programs, such as disability insurance or unemployment compensation; Medicare; all other health programs, such as Medicaid; and all programs for education, job training, and social services.

That amount has increased steadily, under Democrats and Republicans, during booms and recessions. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, Federal welfare state spending was 58% larger in 1993 when Bill Clinton became president than it had been 16 years before when Jimmy Carter took the oath of office. By 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated, it was 59% larger than it had been in 1993.

Overall, the outlays were more than two-and-one-half times as large in 2013 as they had been in 1977. The latest Census Bureau data, from 2011, regarding state and local programs for "social services and income maintenance," show additional spending of $728,000,000,000 beyond the Federal amount. Thus, the total works out to some three trillion dollars for all government welfare state expenditures in the U.S., or just under $10,000 per American. That figure does not include the cost, considerable but harder to reckon, of the policies meant to enhance welfare without the government first borrowing or taxing money and then spending it. I refer to laws and regulations that require some citizens to help others directly, such as minimum wages, maximum hours, and mandatory benefits for employees, or rent control for tenants.

All along, while the welfare state was growing constantly, liberals perpetually were insisting that it was not big enough or growing fast enough. So, I wondered five years ago whether there is a Platonic ideal when it comes to the size of the welfare state--whether there is a point at which the welfare state has all the money, programs, personnel, and political support it needs, thereby rendering any further additions pointless. The answer, I concluded, is that there is no answer--the welfare state is a permanent work-in-progress, and its liberal advocates believe that, however many resources it has, it always needs a great deal more.

The argument of Never Enough is correct as far as it goes, but it is incomplete. It offers an answer to two of the journalist's standard questions: what is the liberal disposition regarding the growth of the welfare state and how does that outlook affect politics and policy? However, it did not answer another question: why do liberals feel that, no matter how much we are doing through government programs to alleviate and prevent poverty, whatever we are doing is shamefully inadequate?

Mostly, my book did not answer that question because it never really asked or grappled with it. It showed how the Progressives of a century ago, followed by New Deal and Great Society liberals, worked to transform a republic where the government had limited duties and powers into a nation where there were no grievances the government could or should refrain from addressing, and where no means of responding to those grievances lie outside the scope of the government's legitimate authority.

This implied, at least, an answer to the question of why liberals always want the government to do more--an answer congruent with decades of conservative warnings about how each new iteration of the liberal project is one more paving stone on the road to serfdom. Readers could have concluded that liberals never are satisfied because they get up every morning thinking, "What can I do today to make government a little bigger, and the patch of ground where people live their lives completely unaffected by government power and benevolence a...