What Do Rich Countries Have in Common? Big Government

Today’s conservatives are almost universal in their insistence that big government is bad. Libertarian intellectuals, who drive much of the elite opinion in the conservative movement, will attack the state from any possible angle. And economists, in the past, have sometimes provided the theoretical firepower for those libertarian ideas, making models where markets handle everything in society, and government can only bog things down. My old macroeconomics teacher, Chris House of the University of Michigan, once declared that the economic facts lean to the right.