Once upon a time in America, most citizens expected government to keep the peace and otherwise leave them alone. We built a vibrant, self-reliant, entrepreneurial culture with strong families and solid values. We respected property rights and promoted competition. We understood that government didn’t have anything to give anybody except what it first took from somebody, and that a government big enough to give us everything we want would be big enough to take away everything we’ve got. Americans practiced fiscal discipline in their personal lives and expected nothing less from the people in the government they elected.

Not anymore.

A century ago, government at all levels combined consumed about 6 percent of the nation’s personal income. Now in the wake of massive bailouts and”stimulus” spending, the public sector’s share of what we earn is fast approaching 40 percent. Will any of the advocates of the non-stop explosion of government spending ever tell us at what point they’ll declare they have enough and take no more, or do they want it all?

That’s not a frivolous question. Since January, Congress has spent a full billion dollars every single hour. The flood of red ink is adding to the national debt to the tune of about $4 billion every day. At more than $11 trillion, that debt amounts to $36,000 for every living American.

We’re told that certain private firms such as General Motors are “too big to fail.” So we’re in the process of handing big chunks of them over to the government. Companies that lose billions are being told what to do by an outfit that loses trillions.

Here’s an even more fundamental question: Are we trusting our economy and our lives to a government that is too big to succeed?

In their 1982 best-seller, “In Search of Excellence,” Tom Peters and Robert Waterman explained that an organization is prone to failure when it no longer “sticks to the knitting.” When it allows its mission to blur and be stretched far beyond its founding design, when it becomes distracted by endless and dubious new responsibilities, its core competency evaporates. It will fail to do what it is supposed to do, because it’s doing too much of what it’s not supposed to do. We now have a government whose reach even before the financial crisis scarcely left an aspect of American life untouched, from the cradle to the grave and the volume of our toilet bowl water in between. Enough is enough.

Most people would recognize the inherent wrong in taking a dollar from the innocent, the responsible, or the efficient and giving it to the guilty, the irresponsible or the sloppy. What is it about doing that a trillion times that makes it right?

David Littmann, senior economist at Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy, notes the first round of handouts to General Motors and Chrysler “have cost the companies and the nation a fortune: tens of billions of dollars, more layoffs, plant closings, corporate embarrassment, unwanted inventories, desperate discounting programs, and worst of all, the foregone opportunity to focus on meeting the new challenges of a post-recession global auto economy.” To avoid an orderly bankruptcy, taxpayers are underwriting mismanagement and profligate union contracts. The message it’s sending to companies both healthy and unhealthy is, “Do the right things and you’re on your own but do the wrong things, even when forced to by the government, and taxpayers will take care of you.” Welfare works no better for companies than it does for people.

Bailing out companies is unsustainable, unfair and unaffordable. It guarantees much higher taxes, debt and inflation either today or tomorrow. It introduces the moral hazard of encouraging the very bad practices and policies in business and government that caused our current problems. It’s an expensive, ineffective band-aid that cures nothing and ensures an even more painful day of reckoning down the road. It undercuts the most vital factor in the success of a nation, individual liberty.

Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington.