Robert Higgs, the American economic historian, said, ‘The masses can be turned around on a dime on the basis of a crisis, even a bogus crisis. The politicians will quickly come running round to exploit on a crisis.’ He has good form for predicting the effects of crisis on government. In his book Crisis and Leviathan he postulated that the First World War, Great Depression, Second World War, Johnson–Nixon years, 9/11 and the Great Recession that started in 2008 all caused the US government to expand,
