Strategically promoting public inefficiency

Private police filling the craters left by the SA police service

The Star yesterday ran a front page article regarding the cost to citizens of private policing.  R50 billion a year, says the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority of South Africa.

Here is a prime example of why government services are not needed at all.  The free market has again solved a situation that has been left a mess by incompetence in bureaucratic halls, and South Africans now spend roughly R10,000 per taxpayer for the privilege to have a reliable policing service in their residential neighbourhoods or business centres.

Readers all know that they pay their taxes yet receive nearly nothing in return.  To figure out how little we get in return for money spent on public policing, we refer briefly to the national budget.

The national budget allocates roughly R50 billion to the Safety and Security portion of government spending (source).

On Correctional Services, taxpayers spend R14 billion every year (source).

Defence spending gets another R32 billion from taxpayers (source).

Add onto the taxpayer’s tab the bill for the Independent Complaints Directorate, the govt department that “investigates complaints of criminality and misconduct against members of the South African Police Service (SAPS), and the Municipal Police Service (MPS),” and we’re up another R130 million.

The bill for public policing and security therefore comes to nearly R100 billion: R20,000 per taxpayer per year!

The total bill for policing, both public and private, therefore comes in at a whopping R30,000 per year.  Yet only a third of those monies actually fund productive enterprise, the rest is lining fat cats’ pockets.

So in effect taxpayers religously hand over their hard earned incomes to a coercive state which does not give taxpayers (consumers) an option in terms of price or quality of service.  With no checks and balances on government services, in other words, with no profit or loss incentive to public services – that one crucial element to operating in the private sector which force businesses to earn a positive income and remain in business - the state inevitably becomes inefficient and the quality of service deteriorates.  It doesn’t happen overnight, in SA’s case it took several decades, with the last decade and a half seeing an acceleration of the decay.

Now you might ask why the government doesn’t just privatise the whole bang toot!  You might also ask why we don’t just stop paying taxes in light of these facts.

The government must control the SAPS and judicial system, both which have as their main purpose the coercion and compulsion of citizens, of which paying taxes over to SARS is arguably the most important aspect.  Remember, without forcing people to use its paper money and forcing people to comply with tax laws, the state has no resources whatsoever at its command, excepting those it has appropriated before within a coercive state and with taxpayer monies.

The point is that while private policing adapt quickly to client demands, the state never will.  It cannot feel demands in its pocket, and as such, doesn’t care for it.  All it must do to raise its income is increase tax rates and the police force by another 55,000 and come steal it from you lawfully.

It is the state police that will round you up and prosecute you in the state judicial system when you refuse to, as a free economic citizen would, choose what to spend your income on and who to give your income to.  So paying taxes is made a law and the state over time brainwashes the public into believing it is noble to pay your income to thieves.

Unfortunately there is no way around this.  The state will never privatise its police force, military, or judicial system as it is these that maintain the status quo. Other than arranging a ratepayer association and withholding taxes until services have been delivered, there isn’t much that can be done to be able to not waste your income on ineffective policing and military “services”.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, however.  As freeman said some months ago: “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.”

Better to have a failing and ineffective government so that private services can spring up and show people the light before the dangerous efficiency of a well-run government inevitably buckles under the leviathan it creates, leaving a bunch of state-dependent adults and politicians to sort out the mess!

“Instead, Human Action says, don’t fight for better public services, fight for worse 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.”