One thing that became very apparent during the pandemic is that government schools are mostly run for the benefit of bureaucrats rather than students.
Not that any of us should have been surprised.
The same is true for other government bureaucracies, as well as parts of the private sector where there is a lot of government intervention that subsidizes featherbedding.
What’s especially galling is when budget increases are used to hire more bureaucrats, yet taxpayers get nothing of value in exchanges.
That’s certainly the case in the United States, where education bureaucracies (and education spending) have dramatically increased, yet there has been no concomitant increase in educational outcomes.
Another examples come from the United Kingdom where the government-run National Health Service gets more money and more bureaucrats every year, as explained in CapX by Fiona Bulmer, yet there’s never an improvement in health outcomes.
Indeed, these five sentences are a perfect example of government bureaucracies in action.
…the NHS in England employs the full time equivalent of 1.2 million people, nearly 200,000 more than they did in 2012.
…in 2021, the NHS was around 16% less productive than before the pandemic.
…one of the managers lamented to me that he could schedule a maximum of four knee operations a day but in the private sector they manage eight a day.
…7m people on NHS waiting lists.
The NHS, like all organisations where users have no choice defaults to accommodating the providers not the consumers.
I’m left with two conclusions after reading those depressing numbers.
- First, the Conservative Party is unwilling to do anything to restrain spending on the NHS (or any other part of the UK budget), which is why their main role nowadays is to be the tax collectors for the welfare state.
- Second, the so-called national conservatives in the United States, given their dirigiste policy agenda of more intervention and more government spending, seem to want a very similar fate for the United States.
The obvious takeaway, as I’ve previously noted, is that if you don’t want massive future tax increases, there’s no alternative to what critics call “free-market fundamentalism.”
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Image credit: FrancisTyers | CC BY-SA 3.0.
