Government creates poverty

No government has never made a society more wealthy without stealing that wealth from another country. Within its own jurisdiction, it steals from one group and gives to another then charges everyone for the "service". Any society must be poorer in direct proportion to the size of its government. That is unless they start a war in order to steal the wealth of a weaker country.

Producers and consumers

The natural state of the world is that societies consist of producers and consumers. Producers are those who are net creators of goods that are desirable and for which people will trade their own labor or rightfully owned goods. Consumers are those that on net, produce fewer goods than they consume. I say that this is the natural state of the world because each person necessarily progresses through life by first being a net consumer as a child, then hopefully a net producer during his or her working life and finally a net consumer again in old age.

We have advanced as a civilization because millions of people have produced more than they have consumed for many centuries. But in recent centuries, humanity has encountered a troubling new trend in government encouraged consumption. Around the world, governments have learned to tax their people not only through direct collections, but also through systematic and intentional debasement of paper currencies. The proceeds of this debasement are then wasted on agressive wars (enriching the preferred military hardware providers), welfare (encouraging net consomption and guaranteeing re-election of certain politicians) and corporatism (enriching banks and other large corporations by protecting them from competition and also insuring large donations for politicians).

So government everywhere has gone from being a consumer of goods, which is bad enough, to being a destructive parasite on the the productive society. Have you ever seen a 1000 pound horse infested with 100 pounds of ticks? Why not? We instinctively know that when parasites reach a certain size in relation to the host, death for both soon follows.

Presently in the uSA, government consumption is over 40% of GDP. This is equivalent to a 1000 pound horse with about 700 pounds of ticks. How fast could that horse run? How long could it live?

Smaller government is not just a party platform, or the dream of pie-in-the-sky libertarians, it's a matter of economic life and death.