Now that we have the question, how to we decide the answer? I think there are several possibilities, but one that comes to mind is happiness. A subjective and flawed metric to be sure, but a metric all the same.
Thankfully, we do not have to resign ourselves to thought experiments with no opportunity for real data collection, as in "Would the average US citizen be happier or less happy if taxes were 10% lower?" We don't even have to settle for logical exercises such as you pose here: "What is more likely, that corruption inevitably makes more government worse than less government, or vice versa?"
Instead, we can examine the beautifully diverse set of data-rich, large scale experiments known as sovereign nations to find how well taxation correlates to happiness.
And voila, your criticism of the article is an argument in favor of the article.