Why governments' attempts to pick winners produce more losers than winners.
David Cameron and the Daily Telegraph think we should subsidise rural Post Offices to keep them open, even though 800 of them get fewer than 16 customers per week. It's funny how people who preach about competitiveness forget about their principles when it is their voters or their readers that would benefit from ignoring economics.
The customers of the shops in which most of these Post Offices are located are very much afraid of the shops closing, understandably, given that they may often be the only local shopping facility, and their closure might mean a long journey for even the most basic of household items. But the shops themselves are often profitable, it is only the Post Office desk that is losing money. Is it beyond the wit of man to close the desk but keep the shop open? If the desk is losing money, this will actually make the shop a more attractive commercial proposition.
"There cannot be any doubt that this bureaucratic system is essentially anti-liberal, undemocratic, and contrary to the spirit of the traditional British system of parliamentary government, and that it is a replica of the totalitarian methods of Stalin and Hitler. It is imbued with a fanatical hostility to free enterprise and private property. It paralizes the conduct of business and lowers the productivity of labour. By heedless spending it squanders the nation's wealth. It is inefficient and wasteful. Although it styles what it does planning, it has no definite plans and aims. It lacks unity and uniformity; the various bureaux and agencies work at cross-purposes. The outcome is a disintegration of the whole social apparatus of production and distribution. Poverty and distress are bound to follow", Bureaucracy (1945), p.12, paraphrasing an "adequate although emotional description" of trends in Anglo-Saxon government.