Theories Regarding the Growth of Government

I'm putting my work on Pathway to Prosperity on the back burner while I focus on growing my for profit business and doing what I can to be useful during the upcoming presidential campaign. Nevertheless, I think I do want to address the larger question of what causes the growth of government. I'm concerned that there is too little attention to the role that the elimination of child labor has on our culture and our government institutions. Remove child labor and you need to provide somewhere for children to be taken care of outside of the farm or factory. They need to be in school and we need to have financial support for them if their parents are killed or injured and unable to work. For an interesting book that looks into the causes of larger government while neglecting the role, apparently, of child labor reform, see Robert Higgs’s 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. Here is the link.