Opposing Views Of Lee And James A. Kahn

There are many links that connect the idea that government size affects how well a country performs and whether or not a bigger government equates to a better performing country. A common way to measure government size would be to look at how much is spent on social programs and the government budget as a whole. In conjunction to this thought, a way to measure the performance of a country can be looked at by measuring the GDP per capita and by looking at the overall growth of a country.
In a publication written by Marc Lee, he suggests some disagreements with the statement that larger governments are bad by mentioning that counties with big governments such as Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands have higher taxes than places like the United

Kahn states that the government is too large in general and that it is in fact larger than what is ideal. His paper supports the idea that bigger governments are bad. Kahn states that government spending actually negatively affects the growth of the economy, especially if the spending is negatively enforced and spent on the wrong reasons. Kahn mentions that poverty is the result of inefficiency of the governments. Some examples about what he is talking about is when some governments decide to restrict trading internationally with other countries or when labor markets are restricted by minimum wage. A suggestion that Kahn made about improving the efficiency of a country is to invest more in public goods. Despite the opposing arguments of Lee and Kahn’s ideals, they both agree that the more that is spent on government spending, the more successful an economy will perform overall. In Kahn’s paper, he brings up a graph that he uses as evidence to prove that “the size of government clearly shows a stronger relationship with GDP per capita than just the ratio of government spending to GDP.” (Kahn, 2011, p.7) In other words, government size and GDP per capita work together instead of it being two separate entities that correlate to each

There are many factors that contribute to whether or not they go hand in hand and that most of the time, one is not the cause of the other. Rather, it is more like everything works together to succeed or fail. I agree most with what Lee states in his paper that the quality of government is more important than the size/quantity of the government. If the government knows how to control their budget and put our taxes to good use such as using them for better and even more public/social services, then an economy will be more successful. Kahn also mentions in his publication that the government is less successful when they restrict trading internationally because this is just a way to shut down the spread of wealth and resources between at least two, if not more, countries. Also, I do not believe it is a good idea if the government restricts the labor market because this leads the workers to be less motivated to stay and work which leads to less people wanting to stay at their jobs which results to inefficiency and possibly unethical work