How many of those pointless, time wasting bullshit jobs are directly linked to the gross expansion of government in the 20th century? Finance, law, health care, education... almost all of the jobs he complains about are built around the requirements of bureaucracies and laws, and the exploitation thereof.
ok, I'll bite. Interesting hypothesis. What's the control? Given that government exists and has a significant role in the system, how can we control for that in order to identify whether it is cause, correlation, or mere coincidence?
For the record, I think the issue with government isn't government per se but the extreme levels of regulatory capture.
You can try and compare different countries. Some have much bigger governments than others. (E.g. Singapore's government lives of ~15% of GDP. European governments are typically closer to ~50% of GDP.)
Holy moly, you could not pick a worse control comparison than a city-state financial center when trying to discuss economics of large diverse countries.
