The growth of a bureaucracy in America (and in all Western democracies) is a direct result of the people’s will. If my town’s river is being polluted by a careless business in the town upstream, I would expect there to be some mechanism whereby my town could stop it. Ever since the Clean Water Act, there is.

We have lived so long with these layers of protection that we’ve come to ignore them. They just work. We take it for granted that they just work. But when the EPA isn’t there to stop the pollution, when the FDA isn’t there to protect the food supply; and when the local Zoning Board doesn’t stop that guy from building a 20 story glass-and-steel casino next to your house in a nice suburban subdivision, people will become a bit more circumspect about whom they choose to put in the office of President.