I think the strongest argument for limited government is given by public choice economics: well-organized (and often well-funded) concentrated interests will tend to capture political power at the expense of the dispersed public interest. The redistributive and regulatory state thus becomes an instrument of the very forces it is meant to check.

But a problem looms. I’ll call it the containment conundrum: our most powerful reason for thinking that we should limit government (viz. public choice economics) is also a powerful reason for thinking that a limited government will never remain limited.

Imagine that you wake up tomorrow to the minarchist society of your dreams. The state is limited to the police, the military, the courts, and a social minimum. Things are going well—until even the limited sum of state power finds itself being captured. Suppose, say, police union lobbyists work to insert fine print into some otherwise mundane legislation to create a small penalty for the possession and distribution of certain “controlled substances” to increase revenue for their department.

All else equal, we should expect this legislation with its decidedly un-libertarian fine print to pass. After all, the benefits to the police union are concentrated and the costs to the rest of us are dispersed. The expected benefit of your effort to read and vote against the legislation is smaller than (e.g.) the expected cost of the gas it takes to get to the polls. So the legislation passes and the penalty is created. This process repeats a thousand times over and soon enough we’ve left limited government far behind.

What’s so troubling is that we could only dismiss this “containment” problem if we could dismiss the public choice worries about the growth and capture of political power. But if we could dismiss these public choice worries, then we’d have far less reason to prefer limited government in the first place. Thus, the conundrum.

Is there a resolution to this problem? What say you?