What is the optimal amount of government?

One of the questions I've wondered about for a while is if there is an optimum amount of government. Depending on a person's values, everyone will give a different response. Some on the left believe that government is directly responsible for prosperity so they want a government as big as possible. Conservatives want a smaller government, libertarians want government to get out of the way, and anarchists want no government. With these different view points, no one can agree on what the optimal level is.

Most people would not even know how to numerically measure how much government we have. Thankfully, Aaron Clarey gave a good way to measure the size of government. At least, I heard it from Aaron Clarey, someone else might have come up with it. The measurement is government spending as a percentage of GDP. Today in America, government spending equals about 40% of GDP. This is why America's economy is described as a mixed economy. Shockingly, Cuba is also described as a mixed economy.

The next factor to look at would be the economic indicator that best measures prosperity. So, it is important to consider either GDP or GDP per capital.  The higher the GDP or GDP per capital is in a country, the higher the standards of living will be. Other factors to consider would be purchasing power parity but to keep things simple, I believe the optimal level of government would be the spending to GDP percentage that yields the greatest GDP.

Being on the right side of the political spectrum, I hear a lot of opinions about how much waste and inefficiency is caused by the federal government. I do think that most of the right can agree that 40% government spending to GDP is way too much government. With welfare, WIC, SNAP, section 8, and other government programs, there is about 45 million Americans completely dependent on government programs for survival. In order to take care of these people, the federal government has to tax the hard working productive workers. Unfortunately, having this kind of welfare state encourages the poor to keep having children in order to collect more benefits. At the same time, the poor are deterred from earning more money because higher incomes will make them lose their benefits. If these programs were to be phased out of existence, the poor would not be deterred from trying to advance in careers. At the same time, they would not have so many children and they would have to scrape and claw their way for survival. Either that or perish. Which ever outcome that happens, we would have less of the poor.

With people off of welfare, there is less need to tax the productive citizens which gives them greater incentive to work. At the same time, those people formally on welfare are contributing more to GDP.

One of the biggest issues I have with government programs is that they are all a deferral of personal responsibility. Unemployment income is there to protect workers in the case they lose their jobs. Social security is there to protect workers from not saving enough for retirement. Medicare is there in case a man gets stricken with an illness. Unfortunately, these programs enable bad behavior. People today live paycheck to paycheck because there is some sort of safety net in place. But are there somethings that should be deferred to a bigger entity?

Often, one of the biggest criticisms I hear is directed at libertarians.

"What about the roads?"

Roads, infrastructure, and defense are too big of expenses for the average citizen to pay for. This is the biggest argument for having a government. Roads, infrastructure, and defense allows the average citizen to produce GDP at a high rate. Without roads or computer infrastructure, economies would be all on the local level. Physical movement becomes a real limitation. Roads and infrastructure would only be created by people if they perceive they could make a profit from it. Defense would also be needed to protect the country from foreign invaders. It is these things which I believe government does have its usefulness.

So then, what is the optimal level of government? Forty percent government spending to GDP seems way too high and zero percent seems completely unreasonable. Until I can find a better answer to this question, I'll simply go with Bernard Chapin's suggestion of the 10% state.

On a side note, while searching for the 10% state, I found that Cappy looked into this back in March of 2015. The essential government functions could be cut to a small as the 6.5% state.

Either way, it would be useful for any political active conservative to shoot for cutting government spending. The current 40% government spending to GDP is way too much.