The governments of the US and UK have democratized, then bureaucratized and centralized, over the past couple centuries. Oh, and grown:
The entire US federal government used to spend roughly the amount — adjusted for the size of the total economy — that we now spend on the military alone. That shouldn’t be too surprising, because in the early years — say, 1800 — the federal government didn’t spend money on much else.
And that points to something else: those spikes in spending correspond to wars. You can’t miss the US Civil War, WWI, and WWII. And then spending just stays high. Is this the natural evolution of democracy toward socialism? Or is government spending a luxury good — as countries get rich, the parasites come out of the woodwork?