Let’s start today’s column with a refresher look at my video on the Rahn Curve.

Though maybe it should be called the Armey Curve.

Or even the Barro Curve since Professor Robert Robert Barro from Harvard graphed the relationship between government spending and economic growth in various academic articles 35 years ago.

I don’t care who gets credit, though. What matters is that there is a wealth of evidence (even from surprising sources) that more government spending is correlated with less prosperity.

But not just correlation. There’s a causal relationship. As government gets bigger, that weakens economic performance.

Today, let’s add some additional academic evidence by looking at some findings from a scholarly study in the Journal of Economic Policy Reform by Professors Michael Connolly and Cheng Li.

They look specifically at the economic impact of redistribution spending. Here are some relevant passages.

Given the high levels of public social spending in the OECD, clearly exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008–2009 where real GDP fell on average in 2009, it is worthwhile to empirically estimate the effects of public social spending on economic growth in these countries. We analyze annual panel data from 1995 to 2011 for 34 OECD countries to examine how each of the three categories of government spending might affect economic growth. …Public social spending…has a small but significant negative effect on subsequent economic growth. A one percentage point increase in public social spending as a percent of GDP leads to 0.09% lower growth rate in GDP in the next year, suggesting that increased public social spending inhibits economic growth in the OECD countries. …increased public social spending may inhibit economic growth: that is, the OECD countries may be on the “wrong side” of the Barro-Laffer curve in growth with respect to entitlements.

Incidentally, here’s a table from the article showing how they define redistribution spending.

They call such outlays “public social spending.” Basically, the modern social welfare state.

The bottom line is that the the welfare state is far too big in the United States and other developed nations.

Moreover, all the academic evidence confirms Thomas Sowell’s wisdom on the issue. Simply stated, government is punishing people for being productive and rewarding them for being unproductive.

Of course such policies will undermine prosperity.

P.S. Since we’re on the topic of the Rahn Curve (i.e., the size and scope of government), here’s a visual I saw on Twitter that is worth sharing.

The “narrow corridor” is where government should be, providing some core public goods but not oppressing citizens.

This image doesn’t say anything about the appropriate size of government, to be sure, but it does highlight the challenge of how you give government the power to do good things without giving it the power to do bad things.

America’s founders tried to solve the problem with a Constitution that narrowly limits the powers of Washington. Sadly, those protections have been eroded.