Bureauarchy

This is how it works. A party comes to power promising to ‘do something’ about, for example, education. The new minister sits down with the head of his civil service to ‘sort out’ education. The Sir Humphrey concerned has seen this all before and has a ready answer. “Of course education can be improved, minister.” He says, “All we need is more money and more power.” The minister gives in. Exactly the same thing happens if you try to do something about law and order or immigration. Let the system run for a few decades and you have our current, bloated bureaucracy.

Each department simply tries to be as big and powerful as it can be. A few seconds thought shows this to be a suicidal plan. If the bureaucracy controlled everything, then as the Soviet experiment shows, economic activity would cease and there would be nothing to control. But the bureaucracy is not self aware. It is a cancer, not a parasite; it is indifferent to the health of its host. There is no controlling intelligence, no master plan. It cannot understand that the only reason we are all still here is because it does not control everything.

This is the system that is controlling our country. Ministers are largely ceremonial appointments, figureheads to send off to conferences and appear in the photos. Ministers have very little control over their departments and the reason is quite simple. Giving people orders only works if the people receiving the orders are working to broadly the same plan. Otherwise they will simply examine the order to see how it can be complied with to their own advantage. It is a standard part of folklore that summoning a demon and ordering it to do something will always backfire. That’s exactly how the bureaucracy works.

The bureaucracy has skilfully neutralised all those who would challenge it. It has captured the elected representatives supposed to control it; it has diluted the electorate so that those who actually pay for it lack the democratic power to limit it. Having removed all threats to its power, the cancer is free to make its host’s life a misery until both succumb to the inevitable.

I don’t believe in one man, one vote

It took me a long time to come round to the idea that one-man-one-vote is a problem, not a solution, so ingrained was it in my notion of liberty. However, democracy is not an end in itself, but a means of maximising the liberty of the population. It works best when the population is relatively homogeneous, it does not work very well when substantial elements of the population have widely differing interests.

Such a difference has arisen in our society now. Successive governments have, in effect, used taxpayers’ money to buy the votes of people who pay little or no tax. As long as that group represented a relatively small proportion of the electorate it made little difference, but as our society has de-industrialised and reduced employment, government has taken up the slack with benefits and government jobs. This has caused ‘runaway’ positive feedback. As more people become dependent on the government, taxes have to be increased to pay for them, making more activities uneconomic and forcing more people into government dependency. We now find ourselves in the position that, if pensioners are included, the number of voters dependent on a government check marginally exceeds those supporting themselves. Although it is true that many benefit claimants do not vote, this is more than offset by the fact that taxpayers are concentrated in a minority of constituencies, so their political influence is even less than their numbers would suggest.

The effect is predictable. The leader of the right-wing party appears in a prominent left-wing newspaper promising to safeguard the jobs of those whose contribution to our society is negligible at best and negative at worst. Taxpayers are now regarded as mere cash cows whose opinions are irrelevant. The government simply cannot afford to listen to them as it is already committed to spending not only every penny it can squeeze out of them, but also every penny it can borrow in their name.

It is worth remembering that it was never envisaged that it would work like this. When the franchise was extended to all citizens, the overwhelming majority of them were working and supporting themselves. Novelists of the period tried to imagine the future, but none predicted one in which there would be millions without work. Everyone at the time assumed ‘the masses’ would always be fully occupied.

It is the one man one vote system that is the bedrock upon which this ultimately self-destructive system is founded. Giving the vote to non-taxpayers places a quite literally irresistible temptation to politicians to try and buy the votes of non-taxpayers with money extracted from taxpayers.