The mainstream press has been decrying a failure of governance virtually nonstop since Tuesday but, in fact, the shambles now at large on Capitol Hill is a consequence of way too much government. And not in the narrow rightwing ideological sense, either.

To be sure, fiscal conservatives are correct—the nation's multi-trillion-dollar Welfare State is out of control. Just since 1980 total transfer payments have risen by nearly 14X, from $300 billion to $4 trillion. And that's just the prelude for the impending fiscal explosion over the next several decades as the entirety of the 80-million strong Baby Boom enters the retirement rolls and the count of the nation's pensioners soars toward 100 million.

But Big Government is also out of control at the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, Langley, USAID, NED, IBB and all the lesser agencies, think tanks and NGO's feeding at the hideously swollen trough of national security. Again, in 1980 the comprehensive national security budget for DOD, international operations and veterans cost $175 billion per year, which figure now stands at $1.304 trillion. But even that is deemed woefully deficient by the Uniparty war caucus and is therefore heading dramatically higher as Washington's warhawks and neocons push America ever closer to a needless but cataclysmic war with Russia and China.

And that's not the half of it, either. In measuring the girth of today's Big Government, you can also throw in the mighty Federal Reserve, the corpulent Department of Homeland Security, the weaponized DOJ-FBI, the CDC/NIH/FDA public health commissariat, and Washington's de facto thought-control octopus spread throughout the interstices of the beltway.