Do you mean not long ago when the government budget was 1% of GDP? Nowadays it's 40-60%, in developed countries. Large levels of public spending are a choice that we have made as a society, and the spending needs to be funded somehow.
All we do is make a glorified X every few years, allowed to choose between the plague and cancer. All they do is wasting our money and making life worse for everyone except themselves, their peers and the rich. It's like this at least everywhere in the western world.
If the last year hasn't shown you that, and the last decades didn't either, then I don't know what to tell you.
I'm a pragmatist. The public sector seems the appropriate vehicle to deliver some things, and not for others.
It most certainly isn't a choice we've made democratically.
Rather, it's a case of boiling the frog: a thousand tiny cuts inflicted by elected politicians over the very long term which has slowly led to the monster size leech our government has become.