Advocates of a federal solution to the economic crisis based on spending a great deal of money point out that we spent our way out of trouble during WWII. They are right. We did. It worked.

The problem is, we were able to do it because our federal government was so small. It did less, and much of what it did was done well. In comparison to its European competitors, however, it was rather small and unimportant – dingy, even. Our government was poor but honest.

Expanding a competent organization and increasing its power can, indeed, have a positive economic effect, especially when the competent government is faced with a powerful and effective outside enemy – there’s no luxury of wasting resources when the Nazis are at the door.

We currently have powerful enemies – terrorist regimes and groups worldwide – but they aren’t nearly so effective as the Nazis. We’re not in danger of being taken over by Osama Bin Laden, so our government has the luxury of taking things a little less seriously and being a little bit more wasteful.

And while elements of our government are quite competent at what they do, there isn’t a huge unused reserve of “competence” out there in the economy like there was in 1939. Our economic machine is running, broadly, at capacity now in productive terms, and long may it continue to do so – but some huge federal expansion now would be mostly cancerous and parasitic – three tumors for every healthy cell built up.

We no longer have a poor but honest government that can be assumed to use additional power or resources for the benefit of all. It would be nice if we did, but we don’t.

Our current situation, in fact, can fairly be described as the dark warning that should have been delivered to Washington in the 1930s: “Sure, you can grow out of your current problems. This is what you’ll look like when that’s done.”