This is an excellent question, one that cuts right to the heart of public finance. The answer to this relates to efficient tax policy, Keynesian fiscal stimulus spending, long-term economic growth, and just about everything else regarding the relationship between the government and the broader economy.
And so, of course, the answer is “No”.
There is just no way to stick a price tag on the value of government services and give that number an objective, generally accepted meaning. Not yet, anyway. Maybe never. There are too many unknowns.
In private markets, “value” is in large part determined by individual willingness to pay. This makes a certain sort of sense. Most of us are best suited to know what we personally want and need. Whether a college kid spends a few bucks on condoms or tampons is going to be determined by the situation she’s personally in. She knows best what she’s going to be doing this weekend. Value is discovered, so to speak, by the countless individual choices that we make, deciding on one thing instead of another.
Government spending, in contrast, is determined by political processes. Obviously, there is genuine value to many government projects: infrastructure, public security, adjudication, education, etc. Even a welfare safety net can theoretically be justified by a simple cost-benefit analysis, unrelated to deeper moral concerns, if you believe that a safety net contributes to overall societal stability. The problem is that there’s no way to create reliable comparative measurements. These are “public goods”, or else goods with positive externalities like education, where we feel that private markets would under-provide these services based on the overall benefit of an educated populace.
With respect to positive externalities, there’s no reliable way to run an experiment to determine exactly how strong the benefit is. We know education is valuable, but we don’t know exactly how valuable. It’s one thing to compare robust macro variables–it’s something else entirely to zero in on one publically-provided service and swim through all the statistical noise to get a reliable measure of the overall macro effect from that service. If a single advanced country one day decided to say “Fuck educating the poor! Those brats can learn on the streets!” we could have the start of a potentially relevant data series. But that ain’t gonna happen. Smart countries aren’t going to deprive themselves of the benefits of education, even if we’re all unsure of exact numbers.
With respect to public goods, you have a related problem. There’s no way for the police to protect individual houses based on payment. Either the neighborhood as a whole is safe, or it isn’t. There’s no way for the military to protect some cities from invasion instead of others. Either the whole country is safe, or it isn’t. And so there’s no objective way to tell how much you’d be personally willing to give up to pay for these things. That’s the metric we need to get a good quantifiable comparison. But that info isn’t there. We can see a lot of people make their choice to move to the suburbs and thus avoid paying for inner-city services, but what would they do if white flight were not available? If wealthier people had to stay in the same neighborhoods, would they be willing to cough up the extra dollars for safer streets? If so, exactly how much more would they pay? We can’t know. In the political process, the willingness to pay is obscured.
We can’t read people’s minds, and then deport those who don’t care to pay for security to Somalia. This is the fundamental disconnect between market prices and government prices.
And this is where ideology steps up to the plate in all the predictable ways.
Is there any way around the tiresome ideological disputes? Well… maybe. It could come down to long-run economic growth, which is a fuzzy topic because advanced industrial economies have only been around a relatively short time, and we don’t actually know what other technological wonders await us in the future. But if we can demonstrate a stronger relationship between government size and long-run growth–also keeping firmly in mind who benefits most from that economic growth–then I think it could go a long way to make a compelling argument one way or another, by giving people more information about their political decisions, and thus whether our present-day government spending level is justified based on what we can reasonably expect to happen over time. That could potentially create a clear decision between two basic alternatives, with relatively objective numbers about the genuine costs and benefits of government spending.
Or that could be nonsensical wishful thinking on my part. There might never be a reliable way to quantify the real value of government services in monetary terms.