Crises lead to permanent shifts in the tolerable limits of the true size of government. Crises break down the ideological resistance to Big Government by (1) providing occasions for the improvement of command-and-control mechanisms, which renders them less obnoxious; (2) discrediting the conservative domino theory, with its implications that all civil and political liberties will be lost in a mixed economy; and (3) creating opportunities for many people both within and without the government to do well for themselves and hence to look more favorably on the new order.

—Robert Higgs, “Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government”