Conservatives claim that high taxes encourage government inefficiency and waste, and that the private sector uses money more efficiently and less wastefully. Why? Because government has become so large that oversight, coordination, and decision-making are difficult, corruption has become a problem, market discipline is absent, government officials are prone to spending revenue carelessly, and measuring government waste and efficiency is hard. Hence, taxes should be reduced to limit government inefficiency and waste. But this assumes that market actors are less wasteful and more efficient than government and that they don’t suffer from many of the same problems that conservatives attribute to government. There is little cross-national or historical evidence to support the conservative claims. In fact, evidence suggests that cutting government revenues and unleashing market forces can sometimes be disastrous for the economy and society, as the Enron and 2008 financial crises proved.