It is easy to be consumed by the current. It is where we live and what we have to deal with. For most, history is what happened yesterday or last week. The future is tomorrow or next week. From a practical standpoint, this type of simple linear extrapolation provides an efficient method for getting through life. Conditioned in such a fashion, most of us see the future in small-increment, linear terms. As in calculus, the smaller the increment the smaller the change. From this perspective, life becomes manageable as a series of adaptations to minor changes.

But there is a danger to living life this way. Little changes in short-periods can produce big changes in larger periods. Often significant trends are missed. How often do most of step back and take a look at a longer perspective? As an example, we take the internet for granted, yet it didn’t exist for practical purposes merely 15 years ago. Do we remember what life was like pre-Internet or pre-cellphones? We look at inflation and say it isn’t a problem. Yet, many of us remember buying 5 cent cokes and candy bars. Most would be amazed to learn that prices since 1980, as measured by CPI measures, have risen by 270%. The 1967 Ford Motor Company average car sold at retail prices at about the equivalent of $1.00 per pound. A “big,” “luxury” car cost $3,500 – $4000. Penicillin wasn’t readily available until after the 1940s. Indoor plumbing, automobiles, telephones, televisions have not been around that long. The Federal Reserve was formed in 1913. Since its formation, the purchasing power of the dollar has dropped over 96%. In 1913, 4 cents had the same purchasing power as a dollar today.

Even these examples are increments. After all, recorded history is measured in thousands of years, not weeks, months or even centuries. As one widens the time increments, more discontinuities appear. By discontinuities I refer to changes so dramatic that they could not reasonably have been imagined or projected by most of the people. Much of what we have seen in our short lifetimes represent discontinuities. The wider the time frame, the more discontinuities we encounter. Our conception of government is another discontinuity when viewed against most of recorded history. While the concepts of democracy and limited representation can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans, government as we know it is probably not much older than the founding of our own country. An exact date is not possible because one can argue what country first qualified under the somewhat hazy definition of representative government. For example, New Zealand was the first country to provide universal suffrage and that was only in 1893. Somewhat arbitrarily, let us say the concept about 300 years old. The relevant point is that it was unknown for most of recorded history, a period of 4000 to 5000 years. And even then, government was substantially different in scope than what we have today. After formation, most government growth has been phenomenal, approximating 50% of the GDP of most of the advanced Western economies. Much of this growth came in the last 50 or so years. Thus, one might make a case that “modern” government is less than 100 years old.

Our Founding Fathers, over 200 years ago, never envisioned or intended what our government has grown into. There was no income tax in this country until 1913. The alphabet-soup of Federal agencies consisted of three or four at inception. Now the number is probably well over 100 and probably more than a thousand. The Constitution was written to restrain government from growing into the State it has become. Over time the Constitution has been almost totally eviscerated, becoming little more than a quaint artifact of history. Viewed from a long-term perspective, one cannot say that government as it presently exists is not an anomaly. Perhaps it will continue to grow even larger. Perhaps it has reached its limits already or passed them as  reflected in the current economic crisis. I suspect that when the history books are written 100 plus years from now, the twentieth century will be viewed as “The Myth of Government,” a unique aberration in history where people actually believed that government could enrich them.

Some time before the mid-21st century, our government will be seen as the last bubble. It is already too large to be sustained. In hindsight, people will look back at the 20th Century as a time of massive and continual wars, all of which were started by large governments. Most of these were unpopular and fundable only because of large government institutions (primarily Central Banks). Economic history will show great improvement but at the cost of severe booms and busts. Economic growth in the 20th Century will be shown to be smaller than the 19th century, in spite of all the technological innovations. Questionable growth in the last two decades of the century will be shown to be nothing more than a massive credit explosion that covered the fact that real weekly wages are lower now than they were in 1964. These conditions will eventually be connected to oversized government and to the crisis of the early 21st Century. With that recognition, people will start to dismantle government, to reduce it back to something more closely approximating the philosphy expounded by our Founding Fathers. The process will not be easy and may not be without violence. People in power rarely relinquish it willingly.

Daniel Henninger, one of my favorite opinion jounalists, penned a piece in today’s Journal that I found fascinating. It essentially looks at current reactions (the short-period look) and puts them into a bit broader perspective. His article relates how out-of-sync the government is with the people. In one sense, it is possible to say that has always been the case. And that is true, if one looks at a series of reasonably short-periods. However, if one views history as discussed above, the current short-period look is entirely consistent with the process that, after many other short-periods from now, reduces our view of the Twentieth Century as “The Myth of Government.”

If you’re an elected Democrat anywhere to the right of Barney Frank, and trying to defend a competitive seat next November, you’ve got to be starting to sweat.

You wake up in the morning and just like every other morning as far as the eye can see the only thing in the news is the president’s health-care reform. It’s starting to look like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are leading the Donner Party, the snowbound emigrants who bogged down in the Sierra Nevada winter in the 1840s and resorted to cannibalism to survive.

The betting is that with raw political muscle and procedural magic, the Congressional Democrats will pass something, call it reform and hand Barack Obama a “victory.” Maybe, but I think what we are seeing with this massive legislation is that the Democrats in Washington have a bigger problem: Their party is looking so yesterday.

In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939.

The culture still believes the U.S. has a hipster for president. But the Obama health-care bill, and maybe this whole administration, is starting to look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark—all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington’s Forever Land. But it’s more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive—all the things people hate nowadays.

It’s easy to make jokes about how insubstantial the millions of people seem to be who are constantly using technologies like Twitter. But these new digital and Web-based technologies, which have decentralized virtually everything, now occupy most of the average person’s waking hours at work or at home. Mass media is struggling to stay massive in a world whose people want to break up into many discrete markets.

The one lump that won’t change is government. Government in our time is looking out of it. It’d be one thing if government were almost cool in an old-fashioned way, but it’s not. When everyone else’s job gets measured by performance, its hallmark is malperformance—whether in Congress, California or New York.

We define the past 25 years in terms of entrepreneurs and visionaries in places like Silicon Valley who took a small idea and ran with it. Congress does the opposite. It take something already big . . . and make it bigger.

Associated PressSens. Schumer, Reid and Leahy talk health care last week.

We’ve got Medicare for the elderly, with spending claims out to Mars, so let’s create Medicare for All! One of the least noticed parts of the health-care legislation is its intention to make Medicaid even bigger, when Medicaid’s cost is arguably the main thing destroying California.

There was a time when contributing to the common good meant joining something relatively small like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Now it means being willing to just fall into line behind some huge piece of legislation.

Read Mr. Obama’s speech last week at MIT on climate change: “The folks who pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized.” This, ironically, sounds a lot like the 2007 antiHillary “Big Brother” TV commercial. Its message was that Hillary represented something big and ominously coercive. Boot up that ad now and put Obama’s face where Hillary’s is.

The larger point here isn’t necessarily partisan. It’s a description of the way people live their lives in a 21st century world, and how disconnected politics has become from that world.

If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care—a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge.

No chance of that. Our outdated political software can’t recognize trial and error. What ObamaCare is doing with health care—the “public option”—may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it’s starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go. Wait until EPA’s ghost busters start enforcing cap-and-trade.

People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it’s turning out to be just big-box politics.

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