The twisted logic of government
It’s human nature to try and do things better and sometimes that means cheaper. One of the foundations of a free market is to reward that urge. To encourage those people who take a risk to make things faster, cheaper or better in some significant way. Some call this competitive process evolutionary, those businesses who don’t improve get left by the wayside as the inefficient are weeded out. Free markets are certainly not perfect and certainly only free to a limited degree, governments everywhere interfere in the processes. They are however the best wealth creation tool we have yet invented.
Government, by nature, is not a business and the inefficiency of government is legendary. At the moment the Australian government is not very interested in this free market process, rather are planning to make it illegal. Specifically prohibiting competition against their own national broadband network.
Governments have built many large white elephants in the past. They know their plan is a poor one. So before the plan has even been tabled. Even before any intelligent debate can be constructed they have already moved to make competition illegal. Up with defrauding the elderly and stealing from children’s bank accounts.
The problem is, of course, the government NBN plan will be a disaster. Not just a small one roomed apartment of a disaster. This will be an impressively large multi story mansion of a disaster complete with ballrooms, sweeping marble stair cases and state rooms more grand than Caesars palace. Literally billions of dollars will be spent, $1202 dollars for every man woman and child in the country, if they keep to budget. Which they won’t. And at the end of it we’ll have another massive bureaucratic monument to inefficiency.
It would be easier for everyone involved if we all went home and burned $1202 of our own dollars and left private enterprise to build a network that makes economic sense.
In a twisted logic that is only clear in the spooky corridors of “government world” the answer to this problem is to make it illegal. These evil people who do things cheaper and easier are actually “cherry pickers” you see. They’ll only build things that make sense and won’t commit to spend billions of dollars making networks that will lose money for decades to come. This is wrong on two fronts. Not only will they show up the stupidity of building loss making networks, but they’ll build the profitable ones for much less. They might even make it faster than the government network. Oh evil upon evil.
So as inevitable as it is that governments build inefficient bureaucracies so it is inevitable they will attempt to hide the embarrassment of that inefficiency. Eventually this strategy will fail completely, but not until the current crop of politicians are sitting on beaches drinking the self voted rewards for spending billions of dollars of someone else’s money without consequence.
Decades later government will get sick of the scandals, the endless wastage and ridicule. Not that they care about the money, it’s not their’s anyway. But it makes them look bad you see. So they’ll roll out the welcome mat to private enterprise and sell the whole disaster off at a fraction of the money they spent to build it. Then the traveling carnival that is government will up tent pegs and carry on until it decides to build another monument for a new generation who will, of course, know better.
In a piece of good news, now they’ve got the $2.7 BILLION dollars in their back pocket they are expected to release an actual plan soon.
Thrilling.
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