The puzzle is not why governments grow. Bureaucracies expand because that is what they are built to do. The puzzle is why populations that still have the vote, the language of rights, and a living memory of freer decades sit still while the state thickens, the currency thins, and the official story gets more childish. Chris MacIntosh's answer (link below), is the right skeleton: propaganda to manage what people think they are seeing, debt to manage how they feel while they see it, and a kind of comfort that is real enough to make revolt look irrational and fake enough to leave them poorer than their parents in the only ways that compound. Comfortable people do not storm buildings. They refinance.
The propaganda half is older than the internet and less mysterious than the word "conspiracy" implies. Wartime taught governments that a public can be pointed. Wilson's Committee on Public Information showed that Americans who had no hunger for European slaughter could be given one. Bernays took the lesson into peacetime and said the quiet part with a consultant's smile: the masses would have to be managed, and management would look like information. Lippmann supplied the theory that ordinary people could not be expected to grasp a complex society, so an expert class would pre-chew reality and serve a simplified plate. Democracy would remain as ceremony. Administration would happen elsewhere. That arrangement does not require a smoke-filled room of villains. It requires newsrooms, agencies, universities, and platforms that share a story and punish the people who leave it. Once the story is ambient; who the villains are, which numbers are immoral to notice, which trade-offs must never be named, most citizens do not experience themselves as being ruled. They experience themselves as being informed.
Debt does the rest of the work that slogans cannot. A population that is hungry, unpaid, and unhoused has little to lose. A population that has a mortgage, a redraw, a car note, a HECS balance, and a superannuation statement that still prints a larger number than last year has a great deal to lose, even if the larger number is mostly the currency shrinking and the house inflating. After money was cut loose from gold, the trick was not instant impoverishment. It was the feeling of wealth without the productivity that used to create it. Wages for many households stopped rising in real terms the way they once did. The substitute was credit: thirty years of house price, a card for the gap at the supermarket, a student loan for the credential that no longer guaranteed the life the brochure described. People felt richer because the dwelling was "worth more." They were not richer because they made more, owned more free and clear, or could support a family on one ordinary job. Asset inflation is a sedative. It turns a political problem into a household spreadsheet.
That is why revolt stays a hobby. Resistance costs. It costs a career if the HR department has adopted the official vocabulary. It costs a friendship if the only permitted explanation for housing, energy, or crime is moral failure by the person who noticed. It costs the house if rates jump, the job if you become difficult, the quiet weekend if you decide that the story on the screen is a lie. Comfortable people do the expected calculation. They have kids in school, a loan that assumes the present order continues, and a nervous system trained to treat disruption as the greater risk. The system is a genius at making dependency feel like security. The pension is the state. The house is the bank. The news is the ministry of mood. You can dislike all three and still pay them, because the alternative is to become the sort of person who sleeps badly and talks too loud at the pub.
Australia is a finished illustration, not an exception. A rich country can run down housing supply, energy reliability, and wage growth and still look fine from the balcony. The balcony is the point. As long as grocery apps work, sport is on, and the valuation of the brick box keeps the family balance sheet from screaming, the argument stays inside the permitted channels: which party will "manage" the same machine. That is not cowardice in the cartoon sense. It is the rationality of people who have been given just enough cushion that the true cost of the cushion: higher prices, thinner ownership, a politics that treats them as a problem to be administered, never quite becomes a single unendurable night. They take it because taking it still looks cheaper than not taking it.
The limit is the same limit described from the other end of the telescope. Stability breeds leverage, leverage breeds fragility, and fragility can hide in the financial system longer than it hides in a household's felt life. While prices rise, questions fall. When the illusion breaks, when the house stops being an ATM, when the currency's loss of meaning shows up in the trolley, when the official story and the street no longer rhyme, comfort stops doing its job. Until then, propaganda supplies the explanation and debt supplies the hush money. Comfortable people do not revolt. They refresh the app, pay the minimum, and wait for a better government to do the same things more politely. That patience is the product. It is also the trap.
https://internationalman.com/articles/why-comfortable-people-dont-revolt-propaganda-debt-and-control/