I frequently rage against the Left for its failure to acknowledge and
appreciate reliable data that proves the entire Lefty worldview to be
wrong. Well a big pile of data just washed up on the front door of
every Lefty who isn't blind and deaf.
Keith Marsden wrote an article in the June 16th (2008) Wall Street Journal titled New Evidence on Government and Growth.
Marsden took two clusters of nations: one he labeled 'littler
government' based on their government expenditures as a percent of GNP.
He took Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Ireland, South Korea,
Latvia, Singapore, the Slovak Republic and the U.S. For the 'bigger
government' cluster he took Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
These two clusters look like a fair choice to me. There are no ringers and some of my favorites are in both groups.
Marsden looked back at twenty years of data. Both groups showed a
decline in the GNP proportion of government expenditures between the
first and second decades. The bigger government group had a smaller
decline in the proportion of GNP to government expenditures.
Then Marsden looks at every classic measure of change: wages, income equality, crime, health, economic growth, unemployment, exports, discretionary income, consumption, care for the poor and employment growth. In every case, the cluster of nations in the 'littler government' outperformed the cluster of 'bigger governments'.
That is the data, that is the reality, those are the facts of human social life and one of the most important lessons of the last century. Isn't there anyway that lefties can learn?