You say you want a revolution.

• Author: Domitrovic, Brian
• Position: National Affairs

FOR ABOUT 15 years now, the Federal government, in all its myriad activities, has been in major expansion mode. The Federal Reserve, regulatory apparatus, the tax code, police and surveillance machinery of the state--all of these extensions of government have broadened their reach, power, and ambition in significant fashion since the late 1990s.

The basic metric that reflects all of this is the level of Federal spending. In 2013, the U.S. government spent 55% more money--in real, inflation-adjusted terms--than it did in 1999. Economic growth in that 14-year span has been 30%. Where government at all levels soaked up 32% of national economic output in 1999, it took in 37% in 2013. By way of comparison, for the first 125 years of this nation's existence under the Constitution, through 1914, government spending largely was parked between three percent and six percent of national output.

The gorging on the part of government in our recent past has been so unrelenting that, aside from flashes from the likes of the Tea Party, the public is meeting the development with quiescence. At 6.4 trillion dollars per year, total government spending now is so immense that any yearning for something smaller and more reasonable from our minders in the state runs the risk of appearing as quaint and otherworldly. Government that is huge and ever-expanding is a matter of concern in its own right, but perhaps less understood is an additional problem: the developments of the current millennium are inuring a rising generation of Americans to the immovable fact of big government.

We now not only have leviathan, but a crucial intellectual component of its perpetuation: government's enormous growth ensures that memory of something different is harbored by fewer and fewer persons, getting older every year.

The moment is apt, then, to reclaim a tradition of our recent history, a tradition that the big-government 21st century is striving to suppress. This is the great successful effort of a generation and a half ago to slow leviathan--the effort that gave us the Ronald Reagan revolution of the 1980s.

For, despite the still-large displacement of the economy, market, and private life that the government brought about in the 1980s and 1990s, even in the wake of Pres. Reagan's major reforms, the scope of government in that era pales in contrast to what prevails today. From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, the Fed largely stuck to keeping the dollar sound against gold. Regulatory expansions planned in the 1970s did not come to pass thereafter, and the major spending initiatives tended to involve cuts, such as in welfare and defense.

Again, the outlay picture tells a tale. The Federal government grew by 33% in real terms from 1983-99, while the economy grew by 78%. Before the current millennium, we had a government that got bigger all right, but comfortably less so than the economy. Now, we have a government that leaves the economy in the dust when it comes to growth.

The achievements of the 1980s and 1990s stemmed from one source above all: the centerpiece of Reaganomics, the bill that Congress passed in the summer of 1981. This was the great tax cut that originally had been sponsored in Congress in the 1970s by Rep. Jack Kemp (R.-N.Y.) and Sen. William V. Roth (R.-Del.), "Kemp-Roth."

The tax cut of 1981--which took all rates of the income tax down by an average of 23%, lowered the capital gains rate by...