The way I see it, increasing spending on regulations is not the same thing as regulating. Spending money on regulating just means more bureaucrats shuffling papers and more lawyers. The size of the government is also the wrong thing to measure. The things to measure are stability, justice and infrastructure, which can be indirectly measured with the percentage of people in prison, the number of people on welfare, and the success of NEW business ventures. GDP is another red herring which tends to measure nowadays the success of the financial sector (investment banks) and a few mega corporations. We need to stop focusing on money and start focusing on real results.