Pull back to the larger macro view. Democracies are an automatic fail, so the trick by any group of (banking) manipulators was to convert the republic to a democracy.
Everything, and I mean everything, flows from this conversion. Once democracy was firmly in place, there was simply nothing, absent a conquering foreign power, that could supplant the growth of government.
Money is the mother's milk of politics. If we didn't have a central bank to finance the federal government, and the ability to tax the citizenry in order to pay the bankers' interest on the use of our very own money, the whole system would collapse.
Once basic human vices are understood, it only takes a little leverage to get the ball rolling. The ball has been steadily rolling for quite some time now. How much bigger can fed.gov get before it comes all apart?
In your opinion, did the problem start with Andrew Jackson or with the creation of the federal reserve and IRS, or both?
If the federal reserve and IRS started the downward slide, then I believe we can blame socialist-modeled government schooling for creating a population that would approve of this.
The ball has been steadily rolling for quite some time now.
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Long before the hippies grew their long hair and beards.