Puerto Rico just found a warehouse full of hurricane and flood aid that was delivered during Hurricane Maria in 2017. According to the Daily Beast, they only discovered it now, two years later, in the wake of an earthquake that brought the walls tumbling down and revealed all the aid that had gone unused.
Of course, lessons have been learned, the head of the government relief office was fired, and things will no doubt be better managed in the future. Except, of course, they won’t. At all. This is the government we’re talking about, one of the least efficient methods of getting things done we humans have stumbled across.
Government action doesn’t contain its own feedback mechanisms. People who screw up in the private sector run out of money and go bankrupt. People who screw up in war are dead, which rather removes them from future actions. Government bureaucracy? Not so much, and this lack of incentives is indeed the source of the state’s inefficiency. Because no one working for the government on disaster relief had to worry about where their wages were coming from (taxpayer money would keep coming in regardless of performance), how the agency’s rent was going to be paid, and so on, the hurricane aid could just sit there and rot without any individual paying the price. And so it did.
Do note that it wasn’t that no one knew the aid was there. Rather, no one did anything about it. Capitalism and markets kill mistakes as a part of the system, but the government doesn’t.
This is the system Democratic presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren think should take over higher education and healthcare. In the case of Bernie Sanders, he thinks government bureaucracy should run just about everything. In light of this Puerto Rico mismanagement disaster, rational voters should have a few concerns about all of that.
Of course, we know what the lame response to this government scandal is going to be, too. Clearly, the government of Puerto Rico simply doesn’t have enough money. If we just give them more of our taxpayer dollars, they’ll finally stop being incompetent! Or something. This is known as reinforcing failure, and it’s a very good way to lose everything.
The correct response, rather, is to note the incompetence of the government and lessen its responsibilities. Remove government functions until we find something that the state is actually capable of doing effectively, then leave it to do that and only that. This might take some time and might lead to a certain minimalism in the level of government. But what’s wrong with that?
Of course, it’s up to Puerto Ricans to decide how Puerto Rico ought to be governed. But we should all take a lesson away from this fiasco: There are things that must be done, and there are also things that only the government can do — but there’s only a very small class of problems that are both.
Sure, this largely kills any and every proposal from the Democratic candidates, and that’s less than ideal for them. But, then again, maybe this means the government of Puerto Rico is actually good for something.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
