What's the best way to measure the size of the government?

The very idea of "big" and "small" government is right wing American framing to produce right wing American results. If you're talking about abstract garbage you aren't talking about whether an action is helpful or harmful, what results are good and bad, etc. The idea is a scam.

Who is bigger: Meatloaf, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, or Taylor Swift.

There are a variety of ways to measure the size of things and you'd likely want to use one of the metrics that corresponds to your interest - do you care about the overall budget? Maybe about the number of incarcerated people per thousand?

It really depends what you want to measure.

Government spending/revenue as percentage of GDP is the common proxy for government size. That said actual empirical evidence doesn't lead to clear cut conclusions about the relationship between economic growth/outcomes and government spending. It's very much dependent on the country, quality of government institutions and components of the expenditure.

Intuitively, you can clearly see that if you had 2 identical countries where 50% of gov spending went to building schools, hospitals and roads in one and paying interest on national debt in the other then you would expect very different outcomes with the same government "size".

For the US, that metric has been close to 30% for the last several decades with spikes during crises like 2008 and 2020 (changes to money supply or "minting" is a component of government size but usually a temporary one). It's been relatively stable outside of that since the 1970s. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spending-to-gdp

Relative to the rest of the world's rich countries it's on the lower end:

In my view, it's highly dependent on the quality of the government institutions and components of spending. People immediately think of inefficiency and bureaucracy when governments are brought up but there is empirical evidence to show that gov spending on things like education and infrastructure are usually "productive" in additional to contributing to factors that may not be properly captured by measures like GDP growth.

In short, people reducing government spending/regulations as inherently bad/controlling are at least not being completely honest because it's a very complicated discussion.

US are actually a good example of the limit of small government. Not having a mandatory government owned health insurance show low taxes on paper. But average people and companies still need to pay a lot for health insurance. Replacing a tax, by a de facto mandatory payement still means that people don't have disposable income.

Even in European democracies with high taxes and strong government the control on your life isn't that big. Yes you may need a municipal permit rather than a HOA permission or may have a government employed University Dean telling you that you fail the medical school admission test rather than a private bank telling you the same. But in both cases, the government looks like the best option

I think I've heard that the USA federal gov is bigger than in the past, as in controlling more of an American's life than in its history.

My first thought was that this is really two separate questions but then I realised a stat like this might answer both:

the number of public sector employees as a percentage of the total workforce.

1. If we view government's role as intruding on our freedoms and controlling our lives (I don't), then the more people they employ the more able they are to assert that control.
2. Its the ratio of the workforce that have their working hours dictated by government, its hard to be more controlling that that.

(Its not considering the non-working population, and with variations to lifespan, unemployment, etc that may be relevant ... I don't know.)

And international comparison is available here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size

For a 30 year historical comparison of US data see figure 1.1 here:

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235#_idTextAnchor012

(My reading of the chart is that while total employment has gone up the state and federal public sectors have been pretty flat over that period. This would mean the public sector is currently a slightly smaller proportion of the total workforce compared to earlier in the chart.)

As someone else stated there's really no way to answer this without specifying in what way. The federal government is bigger in some ways and greatly lacking in others. And the amount of finances or revenue isn't going to tell you the size of the government. It just tells you what one of it's resources is. I would argue that if you aren't in an area that's trying to enforce religious rules/laws the average person likely has more freedom than in the past. Obviously based on the demographic that might not be true though.

I guess you could look at governmental budget or number of employees, but raw size is quite a bad metric for overreach. The knowledge that one year a lot of money was spent inforcing laws tells you very little about the effects that has on the population as a whole.

To do that you'd need a good definition of what exactly overreach is, and you'd probably have to do a lot of work because I doubt anyone else had the exactl same definition.

"Bigger" is easy, because there are obvious ways to measure the size of a government, like the revenue the government gets, the amount of government spending, the number of people working directly for the government, the number of people currently imprisoned, or who have been imprisoned at some time in their life. There's also slightly more abstract things like the amount of time people spending doing paperwork for the purposes of the government, and the total volume (pages might be a reasonable measure) of government laws, and regulations.

As for controlling more of our lives, I think it's significant that many of the most influential regulations are local. Cities design with building codes with the idea of servicing car traffic, emergency vehicles, and parking needs. This prioritizes cars over other forms of transit by government mandate, and puts a pretty steep upper limit on how walking friendly (or bicycle, or mass transit) city areas are allowed to be. In most places, you need exceptions to the rules to have areas without roads running everywhere.

A similar thing happens in food regulations. Many places around the world have small food vendors that sell a single (or a few) food items from a stall on the street side. The US has strict food regulations that require sinks, refrigeration, and other items that don't fit in that kind of environment. Most US cities also control the number of street side vendors that are allowed to exist. If you watch "street food" videos, that doesn't exist in the US because of our regulations.

Regulations add to the cost and complexity of housing. My great grandfather built a house. I read the requirements to do that now, and gave up. There are hundreds of pages of regulations and requirements, inspection schedules, and licensing requirements that must be followed. Some of those regulations aren't even free to access.

On the other hand, these requirements placed uniformly on many industries have some benefits. When you buy a house, you can expect it to be suitable in a huge number of circumstances. Self built, self designed houses sometimes have major design flaws, and sometimes collapse or burn down or flood for surprising reasons that could have been foreseen by experts.

It's very likely that more things we do are regulated, and those regulated activities are more tightly controlled than they were in the past. A part of that is that politicians are systemically more willing to make additional regulations than they are to remove existing regulations, even if some of those regulations are known not to work.

Everybody steps on a scale. The cheeseburgers must be acounted for.