Dangerous Efficiency

Service delivery protests in South Africa

Everyone is angry and unhappy with bad government service delivery in South Africa.  I say, get happy, a free market service revolution is not far off – in fact it is happening!

As government fails so people are quickly coming to realise that the private sector actually can provide everything people need.  The beauty of failing government service delivery is that it knocks us out of our state-dependent brain-dead comas and unlocks the creativity, ingenuity and solution-finding ability of the private sector.

Imagine the shock-horror when DHL or Postnet showed that private postal services were actually possible?  Do we really need government-run garbage collection?  What about the department of home affairs or traffic and licensing departments?  Why can’t these all be privatised with companies offering varying degrees of service to the market?

It sucks when you pay over your hard earned treasure to a giant moribund state vacuum only to receive criticism, a sour face, and below below-par service from your public servants.  But, a failing bureaucracy is less to be feared than many think for it means a faster path to a free market revolution in services.

In fact, more to be feared is an efficient and successful bureaucracy, for it will eventually topple under the weight of the bloated leviathan it creates, but not before rendering the society a bunch of state-dependent child-adults.  Put simply,  efficient bureaucracy is just the slow path to the free market revolution in services.

The tragic irony of the European social welfare state is that it has managed to perfect service delivery to such a degree that the citizenry have blithely abdicated the responsibilities of free productive adults to a bunch of bureaucrats.  The net result has been the seepage of a slow infectious neurotoxin of laziness and ineptitude throughout the nerve cells of modern social democracies.

The political battleground ceases to be fought on the grounds of real useful political discourse, like the role of the state and respect for fundamental human freedoms, and degenerates into a camp tiff between grown men about who can “deliver better services”.

When a country reaches that stage it not only effectively loses the will to live, or at the very least the will to work, but in order to deliver ‘better’ services each election cycle it must tax its productive sectors ever more punitively until its capital and production structure topples under the weight of too many free-riders and too few actual wealth creators.

Tony Blair ended nearly two decades of Tory rule by promising more and better public services with no tax increases!

Now that’s a political lie any voter can get behind! 

Unfortunately, Blair’s and Brown’s dodgy maths has proven, well, dodgy.  It has left Britain’s public finances in such a sclerotic state that the most common question among savvy investors nowadays is, “remind me again why Greece is worse than the UK?”

Hopefully UK voters aren’t fooled again in the lead up to May 6 this year as Brown promises 2 dollops of happiness for the price of 1.

Most Britain’s know something is badly wrong, but are they willing to relinquish the soft comforts afforded to them by a bloated nanny state for something a little more, well, real.

Therein lies the crux of the problem with efficient public services – they create both a complacency and an expectation, meaning that weaning a society off their comforts becomes ever more difficult.

The end result is not so much a smooth handover of services to the private sectors when government can no longer adequately fulfil the role, but an eventual degeneration of public finances to such a degree that state bankruptcy and default cause services to collapse in a heap.  Places like the UK are in for a rude shock in the coming years.

Show me the evidence you may say.  Ok, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, local government has fully suspended basic services such as maintaining roads and public areas due to empty coffers.  It’s already happening.

Hopefully South Africa doesn’t have to go through a half century of efficient public services only end up at square one by 2043.

Instead, Human Action says, don’t fight for better public services, fight for no public services!  And then fight for lower taxes so you can pay someone else to do it better and cheaper than your local branch of failing government.

Viva, freedom, viva.