If you were going to tackle a leaky bathroom tap you’d make sure you understood wrenches and silicone tape, find a buddy who did, hire a pro, or watch a plumbing video. Before roasting a turkey you’d scrutinize your culinary skills, Google “spatchcock,” or dust off grandma’s paper “cookbook.” But if seized by a whimsical urge to run a major nation, you wouldn’t waste time studying governing. How hard can it be?
Cue the cracker-barrel wisdom and horse-laughs. Why, just stop, right? It’s trucker-convoy common sense. Man, if I were in charge…
Well, suppose you were and I said grab the levers of power. Or, speaking of trucks, suppose instead I popped the hood on an 18-wheeler and said a loose Jimson saddle dappled the sludge pump so please torque out the bindle rotor.
Auto mechanics, credentialled or otherwise, will immediately object that all those things were invented in a comical ancient “television advertisement.” But people who get into government and lunge for the levers of power are enduringly baffled to find that, as long-time British leftist Tony Benn lamented, they are dummies not connected to anything.
The levers. But also the politicians, whose disconnect from theoretical or practical knowledge of government is a major design flaw.
Candidates don’t consider that if statecraft were easy, someone would have done it well by now, or ponder how many have barged in, shouted smarten up, and left humbled. Instead they rush in, generation after generation, convinced the state only malfunctions because everyone else who ever tried wasn’t “businesslike” or “compassionate” or “in our party.”
As I’ve complained before, to become a plumber or doctor you must study plumbing or medicine. But to become a governor you study not government but politics, a totally different craft that rewards those skilled at making insubstantial, impractical, and inconsistent promises sound solid, sensible, and coherent.
If you win, the really awkward part isn’t that your platform made no sense. It’s that you didn’t know how or why.
How many people running for office have heard of de Jasay? Or Milton Friedman’s jibe that there’s no such thing as government waste, just government operations? Or even watched “Yes, Minister,” where common-sense, vain former crusading journalist Jim Hacker keeps encountering problems understood rather than invented by his bureaucratic nemesis Sir Humphrey Appleby, including the hospital that tops the efficiency rankings because it has no patients.
Very little. Including the core of economics, which has always been that incentives matter. And not just in markets. In every aspect of life including government. Knowing what gets rewarded and what gets punished is vital to understanding how any system will function, a.k.a. how people in it will behave. Like financing benefits for today’s voters by piling debt on tomorrow’s.
It sounds simple. But a professor who studied government incentives once told me, at a Liberty Fund conference, that when hired to help a state government downsize he recommended cutting everyone’s budget except his. He eventually saw the irony. But not immediately, because he really was good at something important. Like that consultant pocketing a vast sum for good advice on stopping other consultants from pocketing even larger ones for worse advice.
Then there’s Anand on the consultant conundrum: “I will show very soon in the coming days the progress we are making. You will see that all ministries need to ensure they are doing their part to reduce wasteful spending.”
Duh. We see it already. And that her statement isn’t a plan. It’s an aspiration, to which one can only respond “Yes, Minister.” But how would she know?
