Quote from Max E. Pad:
So since the private sector is doing just fine, In your eyes what is it that suddenly caused the massive state/city deficits, and the 1.3 trillion dollar federal deficit?
I do agree that "just fine" is a big overstatement (though I do think the fundamentals are still improving, albeit slowly). But to answer your question, see my reply, above. We're a big, complicated country, no, empire. Even with perfect efficiency, which the private sector does not achieve by the way, government, i.e. management and administration, is going to be big; particularly since, unlike the private sector, we can't just "let people go" and they're off the books.
Many wish for a time when government was smaller and people were freer, sure, me too, since that time had a better environment, and some frontier left to explore. But we are crowded now, and not just that, we also wield powerful technologies that impact our space and each other dramatically. As I said some time back, the growth of government, worldwide, attends both crowding and improving accounting.