Smaller Government was intended to leave us better off by rooting out waste and inefficiency, but it’s been a failure | Opinion by 1RossGittins
to the pandemic are just the latest, most acute demonstration of the failure of the decades-long pursuit of Smaller Government. It was intended to leave us better off by rooting out waste and inefficiency, so we’d get government services of unchanged – maybe better – quality at less cost to taxpayers.in government spending – after allowing for inflation and population growth – despite politicians on both sides being willing to increase the services provided.
For economists, the private good/public bad mentality is implicit in the neo-classical model of how the economy works. For business people and politicians, it comes from tribalism: the private good guys versus the public bad guys. To the nation’s business people, privatisation spells access to the state’s monopoly pricing powers. Outsourcing gives them easier access to the vast profit-making opportunities of that Aladdin’s cave that is the government’s coffers.
One reason government spending has continued to grow is that governments have continued to promise voters new and better services. This is no bad thing, and is inevitable as we get richer and our wants shift from more goods to more services, many of which – such as education and healthcare, childcare, disability care and aged care – are better funded by the public sector.
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