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.
For the record, I think the issue with government isn't government per se but the extreme levels of regulatory capture.