Elon Musk recently revived the notion of “government efficiency.” No, there’s no such thing. Always and everywhere there’s no such thing. It’s a mirage. Except that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What’s a mirage is highly undesirable.
To see why, imagine if governments could actually achieve efficiency. What would be the purpose if so? Tick tock, tick tock?
“Government efficiency” implies that more government of expanded remit would be justifiable if the capable could just get it to operate more efficiently. No thanks. It’s something about constitutional limits, and liberty more broadly. Even if government could operate more efficiently than private versions of the state (it can’t, but let’s pretend for a second), the private, less efficient version would be much preferred.
Figure that inefficient, undesirable anything that is private quickly disappears so that it can no longer harm or annoy the people. That’s not true with government whether well run, or as is all too often the case, what is horribly run and incredibly inefficient. Paraphrasing the great Rob Arnott, who among us (left or right) looks forward to dealing with government on any level in any capacity?
From there, let’s just acknowledge the obvious. And the obvious is the oxymoron problem. Government quite simply can’t be efficient, and it can’t for two obvious reasons: those capable of running it efficiently would never suffocate their talents in government. There’s too much to accomplish outside of government. Meaning the oxymoron is partially born of talent deficiencies. Yet there’s more.
The exponentially bigger problem has to do with funding. Governments have no funding problems. Get it? They own your work, year in and year out. No matter what they do, or how they do it, government agencies and departments will be the recipient of ever more of your money.
That’s what’s so odd about Republicans bruiting a “government efficiency” commission. Not only does the oxymoron run roughshod over the limited government rhetoric of the right, it similarly rejects the right’s frequent mantra along the lines of “incentives matter.” Yes, they do. And since government operations will be funded in ever larger amounts no matter how inept those operations are, there’s no incentive to improve them.
Taking incentives further, let’s bring in Parkinson’s Law. C. Northcote Parkinson noted that the amount of time required to complete a specific job grows with the amount of time allotted to its completion. By extension, so grows the amount of people required to complete a job. This matters simply because in government, the aim is funding. Translated, the aim in government is to do less and less with more people and more funding.
Since government departments are given lasting life by their budgets and the constituencies that grow around their budgets (and employees), they can’t be efficient. What’s efficient is successful and is soon enough no longer needed. Government operates inefficiently so that its mission is never complete. What’s never complete is able to attain ever more employees, funding, and life.
No, government can’t be what Elon Musk wants it to be simply because Musk is privately efficient in herculean fashion, and government owns a much-too-sizable percentage of Musk’s private efficiency. In other words, and contra Musk, government can’t ever be efficient precisely because it owns an ever-growing portion of Musk’s private, market-mandated efficiency.
Republished from RealClear Markets
