America is a country that likes to think it is inherently opposed to big government. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help,” Ronald Reagan once said. After all, the War of Independence was fought to throw off the yoke of overbearing, overtaxing British rule.

Yet for a country seen as the engine room of free-market capitalism, it has frequently relied on massive government intervention in economic crisis. Six years after the Articles of Confederation were ratified they had to be amended in 1787. The recession of 1786 exposed the Government's inability to collect taxes to pay off its debt.

In the second half of the 19th century a largely laissez-faire attitude to economic policy emerged, but the 1929 crash ushered in an era of big government that arguably was scaled back only when Reagan took office in 1981.His first budget cut $41 billion from 83 federal programmes, and he introduced a tax-cutting agenda that largely prevailed for a generation. Even Bill Clinton declared in his 1996 State of the Union address that the “era of big government is over”.

For all his claims to be a conservative, President Bush has overseen more discretionary spending - adjusted for inflation - than President Johnson's Great Society. The arrival of Barack Obama has emphatically opened a new era of big government - a spending spree already facing opposition from many Republicans and some conservative Democrats.

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