You lied. Go check the data (from any source you can find) for the other years to educate yourself of the consistent trend to higher (what is now nosebleed) levels of government share of GDP in all Western nations.

The rest of your post was as usual, vacuous noise (maybe not the first time we discussed it, but it is the 100th time now...).

Note top-down isn't always "wrong", e.g. it can be the most expedient and when the system has Coasian barriers (e.g. FLOSS without my vision of micropayments) then top-down is unavoidable. My point (which I have repeated so many times) isn't that top-down can be eliminated in every scenario, rather that top-down in the IRON LAW of Political Economics (a.k.a. Resource or Fixed Capital Statism) has proven over and over in all the human history since Mesopotamia to lead to catastrophic outcomes such as world wars and megadeath. It is the definition of insanity to blame that on the free market (repeating the same outcome over and over, and blaming not the causal generative essence), when it is Coasian barriers inherent in the Tragedy of the Commons of collectivizing the taxation and regulatory purse (the honey that funds and attracts the flies) that enable the vested interests to capture the politics. Top-down exists even in bottom-up systems, because the autonomous agents in the free market are top-down decision makers for their slice of the system. The problem with top-down is a matter of the extent of what has been collectivized and whether it creates a divergent system that becomes a cancer on itself — which is the case for the collectivization of the taxation and regulatory resource.

It is simply impossible to fund those horrific outcomes if there isn't a collectivization of the taxation and regulatory resource. Repeat that sentence over and over again, until the profound causal generative essence point sinks in to those loose rocks in your cranium.

The Statist apologists want to convince us that with regulatory reform or with democracy, we can control that collectivized resource and put it to good use and not allow it to be captured. But history has shown over and over that is not the case. Blaming capitalism is the same as blaming opportunity cost. It is analogous to blaming an animal for killing in order to eat. If you put a big pot of honey in front of the free market, the free market will use game theory to try to steal it. No amount of regulation of the regulators who are regulating the regulation which regulates the regulators which... can solve the problem. Only eliminating that collective resource can solve the problem. This is also Armstrong's mistake when he calls for collectivized reform as a solution.

During the Fixed Capital (Agriculture and especially Industrial) Age, the Coasian barrier of the power law distribution of stored capital makes impossible to eliminate collectivization, because individual labor can't generate economy-of-scale production autonomously and thus can't prosper autonomously without top-down organization and thus the clamor for redistribution. But the Knowledge Age changes this fundamentally.

Recently I realized that the currency wars, are beggar-thy-neighbor competitions to see who can reduce the cost of production below 0 with debt subsidies. This is because there are too many people and the Industrial Age doesn't need them (because factories can produce more than we need with only a fewer and fewer workers). The only solution is to move to the Knowledge Age. The Industrial Age economy will bifurcate into megadeath for all those who don't jump to the Knowledge Age.

Communist apologist please go away. If the abject failure of Communism is not enough evidence for you, then just proceed along your merry way to the next Gulag. I certainly don't want to stop you. I am talking to those who want to seek freedom. We are not wasting our time trying to convince Communists.