Ten Reasons Why Governments Fail
When politicians and bureaucrats fail to deliver what they promise — which happens a lot — we’re often told that the problem can be solved if only we get the right people to run the government instead. We’re told that the old crop of government agents were trying hard enough. Or that they didn’t have the right intentions. While it’s true that there are plenty of incompetent and ill-intentioned people in government, we can’t always blame the people involved. Often, the likelihood of failure is simply built in to the institution of government itself. In other words, politicians and bureaucrats don’t succeed because they can’t succeed. The very nature of government administration is weighted against success.
Here are ten reasons why:
I. Knowledge
Government policies suffer from the pretense of knowledge. In order to perform a successful market intervention, politicians need to know more than they can. Market knowledge is not centralized, systematic, organized and general, but dispersed, heterogeneous, specific, and individual. Different from a market economy where there are many operators and a constant process of trial and error, the correction of government errors is limited because the government is a monopoly. For the politician, to admit an error is often worse than sticking with a wrong decision – even against own insight.
II. Information Asymmetries
While there are also information asymmetries in the market, for example between the insurer and the insured, or between the seller of a used car and its buyer, the information asymmetry is more profound in the public sector than in the private economy. While there are, for example, several insurance companies and many car dealers, there is only one government. The politicians as the representatives of the state have no skin in the game and because they are not stakeholders, they will not spend much efforts to investigate and avoid information asymmetries. On the contrary, politicians are typically eager to provide funds not to those who need them most but to those who are most relevant in the political power game.
III. Crowding out of the Private Sector
Government intervention does not eliminate what seem market deficiencies but creates them by crowding out the private supply. If there were not a public dominance in the areas of schooling and social assistance, private supply and private charity would fill the gap as it was the case before government usurped these activities. Crowding-out of the private sector through government policies is constantly at work because politicians can get votes by offering additional public services although the public administration will not improve but deteriorate the matter.
IV. Time Lags
Government policies suffer from extended lags between diagnosis and effect. The governmental process is concerned with power and has its antenna captures those signals that are relevant for the power game. Only when an issue is sufficiently politicized will it find the attention of the government. After the lag, until an issue finds attention and gets diagnosed, another lag emerges until the authorities have found a consensus on how to tackle the political problem. From there it takes a further time span until the appropriate political means have found the necessary political support. After the measures get implemented, a further time elapses until they show their effects. The lapse of time between the articulation of a problem and the effect is so long that the nature of the problem and its context have changed – often fundamentally. It comes as no surprise that results of state interventions, including monetary policy , do not only deviate from the original goal but may produce the opposite of the intentions.
V. Rent Seeking and Rent Creation
Government intervention attracts rent-seekers. Rent seeking is the endeavor of gaining privileges through government policies. In a voter democracy, there is a constant pressure to add new rents to the existing rents in order to gain support and votes. This rent creation expands the number of rent-seekers and over time the distinction between corruption and a decent and legal conduct gets blurred. The more a government gives in to rent-seeking and rent creation, the more the country will fall victim to clientelism, corruption, and the misallocation of resources.
VI. Logrolling and Vote Trading
VII. Common Good
VIII. Regulatory Capture
IX. Short-Sightedness
X. Rational Ignorance
https://www.activistpost.com/2018/11/ten-reasons-why-governments-fail.html
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