A representative government, however it starts, naturally expands. This is because the elected official’s position is dependent on the majority of people voting for him. Therefore, he (or more often his party) is incentivized to offer them anything he can. If they have problems, he’ll offer to solve them and try to make them as urgent as possible. If they lack serious problems, he’ll make up some for them. Anything that makes them feel that it is urgently necessary for them to vote for him. And, in order to solve these problems, he pushes for new powers and new committees and new expansions to make it look like he’s doing something.

Thus political parties are incentivized to create or exaggerate any problems or danger or crises, the one party to protect you from the danger, the other to protect your rights from the opposition. And so the scope of the government continually grows in order to ‘protect’ you. This is a crisis! A grave injustice! We cannot let selfishness or petty traditions stand in our way!

And so subsidiarity can never survive for long in a representative system unless it is maintained by non-representative forces.