Economists generally like competition because it promotes economic efficiency, more prosperity, lower prices, and higher wages.
But some types of competition can be misguided.
For instance, Americans used to dominate membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.
Now, however, government employees in other nations have risen to the challenge and shown they can be just as spectacularly unproductive and wasteful as their American counterparts.
Maybe even more so.
Consider the doctor for Italy’s government-run healthcare system who only worked 15 days over a nine-year period.
Even more impressive, how about the bureaucrat in India who managed to go 24 years without showing up for work.
Now we have another foreign honoree.
Here are some blurbs from a BBC report about one French bureaucrat who went above and beyond the call of duty.
A top French civil servant has been forced to resign after spending more than €40,000 (£29,000; $44,000) on taxis in 10 months. Agnes Saal stepped down as head of France’s TV and radio archives at the demand of the culture minister. She had previously argued she needed to travel by taxi, despite having a chauffeur as well as a private car. But she admitted her son was responsible for €6,700 of the bill… She said giving him her reservation number was a “silly mistake”.
Yes, there was a “silly mistake,” but that mistake took place when France decided to create a Ministry of Culture.
Then another “silly mistake” was creating a sub-bureaucracy to be in charge of archives.
And then an additional “silly mistake” was to give the head bureaucrat of that useless division a credit card.
And perhaps the biggest “silly mistake” was to assign a chauffeur to a person holding a job that shouldn’t even exist.
All that being said, Ms. Saal deserves to be in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame because it takes a special sense of entitlement to have a chauffeur yet still run up a $44,000 taxi bill in just 10 months.
That’s nearly $145 per day she foisted on overburdened French taxpayers, which doesn’t even count the cost of the car and chauffeur!
And I suppose we should give an “honorable mention” award to Ms. Saal’s predecessor. In his new position, he has also demonstrated an unwavering commitment to waste, fraud, and abuse.
She replaced Mathieu Gallet, who is now head of French public radio and is himself at the centre of a scandal after reportedly spending €100,000 on renovating his office and hiring a €90,000 PR consultant, just as he was preparing a cost-cutting plan.
Oh, and will anybody be surprised to learn that the over-paid bureaucrats at France’s taxpayer-subsidized radio network just finished a record-long strike?
Employees at Radio France ended their longest ever strike earlier this month, after walking out for 28 days.
Sigh. I can’t wait for the day when France will be forced to reconsider whether state-run and state-financed media networks are a proper function of government (like has already happened in Greece).
