Spending public money carefully is a virtue in itself, but running down the public sector can cause huge problems later on<\/p>\n
Slash-and-burn government is back in vogue. Whether it is Elon\u00a0Musk and his engineers taking the axe to US agency spending, the Conservative leader, Kemi\u00a0Badenoch, wishing she had her own mini-Musk, or Sir Keir Starmer<\/a> complaining about the \u201ctepid bath of managed decline\u201d, the complaint is that bureaucracy is bloated and needs to be cut down to size. Last time, it was David Cameron\u2019s team who styled themselves as \u201cdisruptors<\/a>\u201d and brought in the businessman Philip Green as an \u201cefficiency guru<\/a>\u201d. This time it\u2019s Donald Trump. Yet, measured as a proportion of all US workers, the US federal government workforce is smaller<\/a> than it was just after the second world war, when Mr Trump was born. And shifting its work to costlier private-sector operations has not been a boon. Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spending public money carefully is a virtue in itself, but running down the public sector can cause huge problems later on Slash-and-burn government is back in vogue. Whether it is Elon\u00a0Musk and his engineers taking the axe to US agency spending, the Conservative leader, Kemi\u00a0Badenoch, wishing she had her own mini-Musk, or Sir Keir Starmer … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n We\u2019ve heard such charges before. For some it is ideologically driven: they believe that the state is inherently inefficient and that only businesspeople know how to make money count. For others it is prompted by the expansion of government in response to crises ultimately caused by state undercapacity, not overreach. They were wheeled out in the 2010s, after rich states stepped in to save the banks and prop up the economies. Then came the Covid pandemic, in which rich states stepped in to save employees (through such measures as furlough) and support businesses.<\/p>\n
\n One of the great parables of the consequences of an outsider hacking away at a complex organisation is contained in a history of Britain\u2019s trashy cable channel, Live TV<\/a>. The authors, Chris Horrie and Adam\u00a0Nathan<\/a>, give a picture of what happened when the lifelong print journalist Kelvin MacKenzie suddenly got to be boss. Not understanding many of the technicalities of television, he would apparently charge into the studio gallery while programmes were going out live and\u00a0demand\u00a0staff answer his questions. \u201cWho are you? What do you do? \u2026 If you can\u2019t tell me in\u00a020\u00a0seconds \u2026 you\u2019re out.\u201d If the programme fell\u00a0off\u00a0air after they\u2019d been given the boot, he would\u00a0plead with them to come back.
\n Even Live TV\u2019s viewers are unlikely to have been gravely distressed by its inadequacies. But government touches everyone\u2019s lives, and in the most serious manner.<\/p>\n