Bob Higgs has this excellent essay over at The Independent Institute that questions a variety of propositions about the growth of government.
Here I only list the propositions. The essay details why Higgs find them problematic.
Proposition 1: Government activities can be reduced to a single variable (the “size” of government), which can be accurately measured.
Proposition 2: The best measure of the size of government is relative government spending, the ratio of government spending to the gross national product. Good alternative measures include relative tax revenues (the ratio of tax revenues to GNP) and relative government employment (the ratio of government employees to labor force).
Proposition 3: Even if relative government spending (or one of the commonly employed “good alternative measures”) doesn’t properly measure the true size of government, the two are highly correlated over time, and hence relative government spending is an adequate—indeed indispensable—proxy variable for empirical analysis.
Proposition 4: Point-to-point or trend-rate measures are adequate explicanda for the analysis of the growth of government.
Proposition 5: Government can be analyzed as something having an abstract “functional” relation to the economy; it is unnecessary to consider government officials as autonomous decision makers having genuine discretion and making real choices.
Proposition 6: Government can be analyzed as if it were a single decision maker; it is unnecessary to consider conflicts of interest within government or migration back and forth between the ruling group and the ruled group.
Proposition 7: There exists a structure of politico-economic behavioral relations (an “underlying model”) whose workings generate the growth of government as a dynamic equilibrium outcome; and this structure does not change over time.
Proposition 8: Which particular persons compose or influence the government doesn’t matter. Only broad socio-economic changes and the relative strengths of interest groups need be considered.
Proposition 9: In studying the growth of government, econometric analysis is superior to historical analysis.
Proposition 10: The process generating the growth of government is internal to each country; each one’s relations with the rest of the world can be ignored.
Proposition 11: Putative “public demand,” especially as expressed by voting, drives the political-government system. Elected officials (and hence the bureaucracy subordinate to them) may be viewed as perfect agents of the electorate.
Proposition 12: A corollary of Proposition 11: The judicial branch of government can be ignored.
Proposition 13: Ideology doesn’t matter.
Proposition 14: Government grows in order to correct the distortions stemming from externalities.
Proposition 15: Government grows in order to supply public goods that the public demands but the free market won’t supply.
Proposition 16: Government grows in order to reduce the transaction costs inherent in a complex modern economy, thereby facilitating a high degree of division of labor and enhancing productivity.
Proposition 17: Government is nothing but an engine of redistribution.
Proposition 18: The modern welfare state merely “filled the vacuum” left by the deterioration of private institutions.