Ever since the so-called Reagan revolution and the political and economic reforms carried out by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, it has become a common assumption that the public sector will never be able to achieve the same efficiency as the private sector and that, furthermore, a large public sector in any economy is always a synonym of inefficiencies, low productivity, a severe incapactiy to compete in the global market and, as a corollary, poverty and/or the destruction of wealth. In other words, the main tenets of Neoliberalism (or, more accurately, the Chicago School of economics) have become widely accepted by most political and social commentators, as well as politicians and media in general. However, that does not necessarily mean that these ideas must always be true, not even that they have ever been contrasted against the economic data itself. Somehow, as it tends to happen, what could be thought of as the more or less neutral statements applied to Economics as an academic discipline made by the likes of Milton Friedman were transfigured into dogma at the core of certain political platforms by people who simplified those statements to the point of making it impossible to recognize them anymore [1]. Thus, political simplification made it that the private sector always knows best, the public sector is evil and can be blamed for all our problems and, above all, any sort of Government intervention or regulation of the free market system will end up in disaster. So ingrained have these ideas become in our social conscience that even the most liberal politician (the most left-leaning politician in European terms) will avoid proposing any sort of tax hike, additional regulation or welfare benefit.

So, since we do not have time to investigate all these claims right now, I will concentrate on just one of them: is it true that the larger size of the public sector leads to less wealth? In principle, it should not be too difficult to gather the data: both the overall size of the public sector in most developed countries, as well as their total wealth figures are routinely published by multiple international organizations and specialized journals and newspapers. All we need to do is gather all that data together and perform some quick statistical analysis on them to find out whether or not there is some truth to the statement that a larger size of the public sector in any economy should also lead to more poverty. Let me just emphasize that I am starting this investigation without knowing for sure which way the data will lead us, although I do have a feeling the statement according to which a larger size of the public sector always leads to more poverty is indeed false. In any case, let us see what the numbers say.

1. To be fair, some of these economists did their best to raise their stand in the big vanity fair that is the world of media. One only has to remember the Chicago Boys and their semi-religious allegiance to Friedman, who had no qualms being used as one of the ideologues of the "conservative revolution" either.