Economists generally like competition because it promotes economic efficiency, more prosperity, lower prices, and higher wages.
But some types of competition can be misguided.
For instance, Americans used to dominate membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.
Now, however, government employees in other nations have risen to the challenge and shown they can be just as spectacularly unproductive and wasteful as their American counterparts.
Maybe even more so.
Consider the doctor for Italy’s government-run healthcare system who only worked 15 days over a nine-year period.
Even more impressive, how about the bureaucrat in India who managed to go 24 years without showing up for work.
Now we have another foreign honoree.
Here are some blurbs from a BBC report about one French bureaucrat who went above and beyond the call of duty.
A top French civil servant has been forced to resign after spending more than €40,000 (£29,000; $44,000) on taxis in 10 months. Agnes Saal stepped down as head of France’s TV and radio archives at the demand of the culture minister. She had previously argued she needed to travel by taxi, despite having a chauffeur as well as a private car. But she admitted her son was responsible for €6,700 of the bill… She said giving him her reservation number was a “silly mistake”.
Yes, there was a “silly mistake,” but that mistake took place when France decided to create a Ministry of Culture.
Then another “silly mistake” was creating a sub-bureaucracy to be in charge of archives.
And then an additional “silly mistake” was to give the head bureaucrat of that useless division a credit card.
And perhaps the biggest “silly mistake” was to assign a chauffeur to a person holding a job that shouldn’t even exist.
All that being said, Ms. Saal deserves to be in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame because it takes a special sense of entitlement to have a chauffeur yet still run up a $44,000 taxi bill in just 10 months.
That’s nearly $145 per day she foisted on overburdened French taxpayers, which doesn’t even count the cost of the car and chauffeur!
And I suppose we should give an “honorable mention” award to Ms. Saal’s predecessor. In his new position, he has also demonstrated an unwavering commitment to waste, fraud, and abuse.
She replaced Mathieu Gallet, who is now head of French public radio and is himself at the centre of a scandal after reportedly spending €100,000 on renovating his office and hiring a €90,000 PR consultant, just as he was preparing a cost-cutting plan.
Oh, and will anybody be surprised to learn that the over-paid bureaucrats at France’s taxpayer-subsidized radio network just finished a record-long strike?
Employees at Radio France ended their longest ever strike earlier this month, after walking out for 28 days.
Sigh. I can’t wait for the day when France will be forced to reconsider whether state-run and state-financed media networks are a proper function of government (like has already happened in Greece).
P.S. On another topic, I wrote a few days ago about the types of policies that lead to more “SuperEntrepreneurs” in a nation.
Well, the World Economic Forum has published related research about the impact of taxes on “superstar inventors.”
They start by looking at some of the research about taxation and labor mobility.
There is currently heated public debate about whether higher top tax rates will cause an exodus of valuable, high income and highly skilled economic agents. …Kleven et al. (2014) study a Danish tax reform that temporarily reduced top tax rates on high income foreigners and they find very strong effects on the inflow of migrants. In another recent paper Kleven, Landais, and Saez (2013) show that highly paid football players react to top tax rates when choosing in which country to work. …A group of highly valuable economic agents that policymakers perhaps might worry about is inventors, the creators of innovations and potential drivers of technological progress. Inventors may well be important factors for a country’s development and competitiveness – highly skilled migration has been shown to be both beneficial for a receiving country’s economy and to disproportionately contribute to innovation (Kerr 2013).
Then they focus specifically on highly productive inventors and how they migrate to places where the tax burden is less onerous.
…the average top 1% inventor has hundreds of times more citations. Among top inventors, some are highly successful migrants. In general, higher quality inventors are more mobile than lower quality inventors. …In recent research (Akcigit, Baslandze, and Stantcheva 2015) we study the international migration responses of superstar inventors to top income tax rates for the period 1977-2003 using data from the European and US Patent offices, as well as from the Patent Cooperation Treaty (Miguelez and Fink 2013). …From outside survey evidence, we know that superstar inventors are highly likely to be in the top tax bracket and, hence, directly subject to top tax rates. …There has is a strong and significant correlation between top tax rates and those inventors who remain in their home countries. The relation is strongest for superstar inventors. Figures 2 and 3 show that superstar inventors are highly sensitive to top tax rates. The elasticities imply that for a ten percentage point reduction of top tax rates from 50% to 40%, a country would be able to retain on average 3.3% more of its top 1% superstar inventors. …our results suggest that, given a ten percentage point decrease in top tax rates, the average country would be able to…attract 38% more foreign superstar inventors.
Here’s the bottom line.
The loss of highly skilled agents such as inventors might entail significant economic costs, not just in terms of tax revenues lost but also in terms of reduced positive spillovers from inventors and, ultimately, less innovation in a country.
In other words, class-warfare tax policy ultimately is very destructive for the jurisdictions that practice the politics of hate and envy.
P.P.S. I wrote a few years ago about legal tank ownership in America.
But there’s a catch. You theoretically have to disarm the gun, which would take away part of the fun.
Well, maybe you can make up for that loss of firepower by owning a flamethrower, which apparently is legal in 48 states.
Not sure I would want one of these, but I bet the answers to my IQ test for criminals and liberals would be even more interesting if homeowners added some their arsenals.
International Liberty 