From FDR's New Deal to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the United States government has attempted to centralize broad social policies. In the early 1980s, when recession and inflation were at their highest levels, Ronald Reagan took office and declared that the federal government should take a smaller role in the lives of the American people. As Theda Skocpol comments in her book Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in US Politics, the Reagan administration instilled in the American people an aversion to centralized government. This was a major reason, according to Skocpol, why the Clinton administration failed to nationalize “Health Security.” It was this fear of centralized government and Clinton's failure to reform health care that made more centralized social policy unlikely in the near future. In the twentieth century (due in part to the Great Depression and World War II) the need for big government arose. The legislation underlying Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal involved the federal government's involvement in creating highly bureaucratic social policy. The combination of Roosevelt's political assertiveness and society's willingness to allow such centralization made big government possible. The laissez-faire mentality of the 1920s was seen as the cause of the Depression. The federal government and the reforms that followed were seen as a way to ensure economic security. In the sixties...