Yes, "government is a broker in pillage," as noted by H.L Mencken, but in the end, the problem lies with us. George Will explains it here.
Democracy is representative government, which is the problem. Democracy represents the public’s preferences, which are mutable, but also represents human nature, which is constant. People flinch from confronting difficult problems until driven to by necessity’s lash. The Claremont Institute’s William Voegeli, commenting on Greve and the dubious postulate of continuous 5 percent growth, says: “There’s good reason to fear that if the economy builds a 5 percent levee the polity will just come up with a 6 percent flood. We humans adroitly use scant and equivocal evidence to convince ourselves that the most congenial interpretation of events is also the most plausible and durable.”
Writing in 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay asked, “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” Greve’s gloomy answer is: Because we actually see behind us protracted abandonment of the Founders’ flinty realism about the need to limit government because of the limitations of the people.
I discussed the same thing back in May. As more and more of state and federal power is used to transfer money from one person to another person, including and especially from future generations to the present, there is no end in sight to how much people want the government to spend on them.