ications to financial services.
More indirectly, North and Wallis argue, the rising transaction level of society also drives the rise in transfer payments. A more complex society with more transactions makes possible the organization of special interest pressure groups, which can then lobby the government for transfer payments of one kind or another.
The authors of this article succeed first of all in calling attention to essential shallowness of the conservative complaint about "out of control" government a shallowness that has been strikingly illuminated by the continuation of the growth of government even through years of conservative administrations. This article also brings into focus something that those sympathetic to the role of government must believe, but often find hard to articulate: that in a more complex society, there is simply a need for a broader range of government interventions.
Some of these new interventions are fairly straightforward. The government maintains an air traffic control system so that business executives and others can fly coast to coast in a few hours, as our go go society seems to require. More subtle services are required because our society is more complex and specialized. We can't tell a good TV repairman from a bad one until it is to late, so we depend on a government licencing agency to assure us at least some minimum level of skill.
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