But whenever I hear about how government intervention in the marketplace is withering away — to be replaced by untrammeled markets — I am forced to wonder what metric these people are using. By what measure are governments getting smaller, weaker, and less involved in the daily lives of human beings? In this country, at least, this case certainly can’t be made by consulting the data on government taxation and spending. From 1960 to 2018, federal tax receipts per capita increased from $3,523 to $5,973, an increase of 70 percent.
