Here’s an odd paradox.  

According to a new Gallup survey asking Americans whether they consider government corruption widespread, a record 89% responded “yes.”  

Nevertheless, leading political figures continually propose that Americans grant government even more authority over our healthcare, internet access, children’s education, economy and our personal income.  

That’s the peculiar contradiction highlighted by Gallup’s latest survey, in which 89% now say that government corruption is widespread, up 10% in just one year and well above the 72%-79% range recorded from 2010 through 2025.  

At least something still unites us, and perhaps that rare point of consensus can prompt improved public policy choices – namely, reduced government control over our lives.  

Gallup’s latest announcement also parallels its broader recent annual survey of Americans’ confidence in major institutions.  Namely, small business – perhaps the institution most representative of free enterprise and independence from government – once again ranked first among Americans with 67% public confidence.  In contrast, institutions commonly associated with “big government” continued to populate the dismal realms of that survey.  For example, public schools languished at 27%, while average confidence across the 14 institutions Gallup measures stood at just 27%, essentially maintaining its record low.  

The obvious lesson is that perhaps government ought to do less, but too many politicians and candidates draw precisely the opposite lesson.  

Consider the political left’s bizarrely fashionable “Medicare for All” idea.  

On that issue, advocates like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez propose placing Americans’ healthcare even more completely under federal control, while the existing Medicare program already confronts a looming financial crisis.  To illustrate, Medicare expenditures already exceeded $1.2 trillion – that’s more than defense spending – in 2025.  According to the government’s own 2026 Medicare Trustees Report, the Hospital Insurance trust fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2033, at which point incoming revenues would cover only 89% of scheduled benefits.  

Despite those realities, some want to expand government’s responsibility in that realm from approximately 69 million Medicare beneficiaries to everybody?  

That same troubling cognitive dissonance also infects our ongoing debate over lifesaving prescription drug policy.  

Making prescription drugs more affordable remains an important effort.  Too many politicians, however, reflexively advocate big-government price controls, notwithstanding the repeated and overwhelming lesson of history and economics that price controls only serve to create shortages, not lower costs, because they reduce incentives to produce and make them available.  

In the realm of lifesaving pharmaceuticals, that danger becomes literally a matter of life and death for Americans.  

Developing new medicines requires enormous investment, years of research and tremendous entrepreneurial risk.  Artificial price controls by definition diminish the potential return on that risk and investment, meaning fewer prospective medicines justify the expense and risk of development.  

In a natural sequence of cause-and-effect, destructive drug price controls consequently end up making lifesaving pharmaceuticals less available, not more.  

Americans have witnessed the same inexplicable impulse to expand government’s role over other vital sectors of our lives and economy in recent years.  

As a leading example, recall the Obama and Biden Administrations’ Orwellian-named “Net Neutrality” experiment, which subjected internet service to Depression-era Title II public-utility regulation.  For nearly two decades beforehand, a bipartisan federal “light-touch” regulatory approach allowed the internet to become perhaps the most rapidly transformative innovation in human history.  

Advocates of bigger government, however, decided to “fix” something that wasn’t broken.  

As a result in Net Neutrality’s gratefully brief lifetime, private broadband investment declined following the Obama Administration’s 2015 order for the first time in history outside of an economic recession.  After the Trump Administration Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restored the federal government’s two-decade light-touch regulatory approach, however, investment and internet speeds accelerated again.  

The same lesson extends well beyond healthcare and telecommunications.  

If Americans distrust centralized government, why deny parents school choice and instead consign children to union-dominated government schools regardless of performance?  

If Americans distrust government, why tolerate government taxing ever-larger shares of our paychecks rather than allowing families and businesses to decide how to spend and invest their own money?  

If Americans perceive government corruption as widespread, why empower more regulators to decide what businesses may produce, how they may operate and what prices they may charge?  

None of this advocates an anarchic abolition of government.  Limited government doesn’t mean no government.  Protecting public safety, national security, property and the rule of law remain indispensable functions.  

At the same time, government possesses something that private organizations do not: coercive power.  

And that makes Gallup’s newest finding particularly instructive.  

Americans overwhelmingly believe corruption in government is widespread, and express greater confidence in private enterprise and other accountable institutions than bureaucratic counterparts.  Too many political leaders, however, prescribe the same medicine of more government authority, more regulation, more taxation and more centralized control.  

Instead of wondering why Americans distrust government, voters and political leaders should apply that learned experience, because the elixir for record distrust of government is smaller government, not more government.