This is the Kader Daily Podcast for Monday, April 1st, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

War may be the health of the state, but crisis is regularly how government grows.

Abigail Hall is a professor of economics at the University of Tampa we discussed last

month in Texas her work attempting to get at a good measure of the growth of government during times of crisis, and why that

expansion of government isn't always easily captured by pages of regulation or federal spending.

Many economists are familiar with the concept of the ratchet effect.

This largely comes from the work of the great Robert Higgs. Hello Robert,

I hope you're listening. If you don't mind just characterize what that is to give me a clear clean

definition of what the Ratchet effect is and why it's worth understanding it.

Sure, so the Ratchet effect is a framework for understanding. worth understanding it. It. Sure.

So the Ratchet Effect is a framework for understanding growth in government, and it's important

for potentially understanding growth in terms of the scale of government, so the size of government, but also scope, so the type of

activities in which government is involved.

So the basic elements of the framework are the following. You have some government growth that's

occurring for a variety of different reasons. There are lots of different

theories of government growth, but in this framework there is some kind of

crisis that occurs and as a result of that crisis there is this push or this call for government to do something to

get rid of or to otherwise temper the crisis.

Government as a result expands in scale and scope.

Over time, the crisis abates,

and government does reduce some of the activities that it started engaging in as a result of this crisis

...