Why governments' attempts to pick winners produce more losers than winners.
Sharp as always, Wat Tyler at Burning Our Money has posted today about the Waste Resources Action Programme or WRAP (how clever - I wonder what came first, the name or the acronym... mmm, I wonder?). Now, as you will have probably guessed already WRAP is a Quango, but what makes them particularly special is they are challenging the British Potato Council for the most pointless use of public money. Indeed, the Quango that gave us National Chip Week is now being challenged by the Quango that gives us its research in to household food waste. Yes it does happen, folks - we throw away 6.7m tonnes of food every year. Incredible. What are we thinking throwing away all that perfectly good food? Well half of it is not perfectly good food, it's waste. Potato peelings, teabags, bones, that sort of thing. Why did they include old bones in this total, the overpaid bunch of clueless goons (see Wat's picture). That 6.7m tonnes statistic is probably the most pointless, meaningless stat of the year so far. And it costs us £80m a year to receive these nuggets of information. Great find Wat - if it wasn't true I'd probably be laughing even more.
"There is a field, namely, the handling of the apparatus of government, in which bureaucratic methods are required by necessity. What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucracy as such, but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied. This expansion is the unavoidable consequence of the progressive restriction of the individual citizen's freedom, of the inherent trend of present-day economic and social policies toward the substitution of government control for private initiative", Bureaucracy (1945)