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If men were angels, etc.
size of government is actually secondary the morality and culture of the people
This. And honestly even just a common morality even if the morality is not perfect is better than what we have now in the US for example. Becoming more and more convinced that the left/right system arguements we have are nearly pointless when we have fewer shared morals and world view.
One of the biggest lies is that only religious people are religious. Everyone has a world view and a world view is just another word for religion. It is impossible to divorce relgiion from government. We think we have a separation but really we just created new religions and are in denial about it.
What we see in politics might just be competing religions. Obviously some systems work better than others but one of the biggest problems that almost always gets shunned as off-limits is cultural commonality. We worship diversity today and it's killing us.
I'd go as far as to argue that the size of government is actually secondary the morality and culture of the people.
that's not to say that government structure doesn't matter at all. even the most ethical people wouldn't succeed at full blown socialism because of the calculation problem. But on the margins of government programs that get actively debated, I'd suspect that the culture of the people matters more than the specific design of the program .