Comment by fifilura

> I am pretty sure that you will not see a negative correlation between tax and GDP, just look at that list.

The short-term correlation is between tax and GDP growth. Obviously if you set a lower tax rate in Greece it doesn't instantaneously become a rich country.

And the correlation exists at the level of taxes typically seen in first world countries. If you try to look at Zimbabwe or Ethiopia and ask why their low tax rates don't result in higher GDP, it's because they're not even providing a threshold level of basic government services. There is such a thing as too low, it's just not a thing typically observed in practice in Western countries. (To some extent the baseline is also an absolute dollar amount per capita rather than a tax rate; you could easily provide police and basic transportation infrastructure for 5% of US GDP but not 5% of Somali GDP.)

> And maybe the politicians and tax officers in Denmark are people that got there because they enjoyed free university education instead of getting it paid by their parents?

The typical causes of government inefficiency aren't the unavailability of qualified people, they're corruption and nepotism, or some other structural misfeature that exacerbates the principal-agent problem.

For example, the US constitutional structure envisioned a weak federal government with enumerated powers and constrained by a US Senate elected by the state legislatures with a personal incentive to inhibit federal overreach. Then the commerce clause was read so broadly as to de facto grant a general federal regulatory power and the 17th amendment caused Senators to be directly elected, leading to a massive expansion in federal power without otherwise changing the structure of the federal government. People elect their local dogcatcher and State Comptroller but the federal executive branch has only one elected official, the President of the United States.

The result is an excessive amount of regulatory capture and corruption, not because there are no qualified people available, but because there is a structural lack of accountability to the voters because the federal government wasn't originally intended to do most of what it currently does.