The Size of Government in Non-Slave States

The question asked by the organizers of this session is: Is there an inherent limit to the size of government in a democracy? The answer to this question is clearly yes if we measure the size of government by the average tax rate or by the average share of expenditure of government. Neither is an ideal measure of the size of government, but both are likely to be correlated with more satisfactory measures such as the net distortion removed or imposed by government. With this caveat, I use the share of spending by government to measure the size of government.