DO YOU WANT MORE GOVERNMENT OR MORE PROSPERITY?
Do you think there would be more jobs, less poverty and higher real incomes if government was 60 percent or 18 percent of gross domestic product?
Fortunately, a global economic-growth experiment has been underway for more than a half-century. Some countries have opted for the big-government model, others for the small-government model. Based on the data, the small-government crowd wins.
Periodically, as new data becomes available, I revisit the topic of how big or small government should be. Many on the left in the United States want a big government like they have in France, which they think will be fairer and provide better services.
There are success metrics, such as real per-capita incomes, economic growth, job-creation rates and life expectancy to give us a good indication of what works and does not work.
This table gives us recent data about how well 10 rich countries are doing:
