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 
[…] what a surprise), a bureaucrat was provided a car and driver by taxpayers, yet still managed to run up nearly $150-per-day of taxi cab […]
[…] French bureaucratic elite is pampered with costly perks and lavish compensation and the nation’s cossetted political class is famously self […]
[…] Is it cossetted bureaucrats, symbolized by the functionary with a car and driver who nonetheless still racked up giant taxi expenses? […]
[…] Os burocratas privilegiados com carros e motoristas que mesmo assim gastam fortunas com táxi? […]
[…] Is it cossetted bureaucrats with cars and drivers who nonetheless still rack up giant taxi expenses? […]
[…] Bureaucrat Hall of Fame has plenty of American members, but it also has civil servants from India, France, and Italy, and the United Kingdom, all of whom have gone above and beyond the call of duty in […]
[…] The French official who had a taxpayer provided car and chauffeur, yet still billed taxpayers for $44,000 worth of taxis. […]
[…] realize I was being jingoistic, but after selecting bureaucrats from France and India, I had been worried that foreigners were beginning to dominate the […]
[…] realize I was being jingoistic, but after selecting bureaucrats from France and India, I had been worried that foreigners were beginning to dominate the […]
[…] also selected the woman from France who had a government-provided car and driver but still managed to bill taxpayers for almost $150 of taxi fares per […]
[…] out highly productive people, and we have good evidence that “super-entrepreneurs” and inventors are quite sensitive to tax […]
[…] last month, for instance, I honored one of those bureaucrats with membership in the Hall of Fame because she managed to squander an average of $145 of other […]
[…] Well, WAIT, THERE’S MORE… […]
ENTERPRENEURS and SUPER ENTERPRENEURS:
Entrepreneurs or Super Entrepreneurs don’t move to lower tax jurisdictions just to keep a larger proportion of their money. Yes, that too, but the main reason is that…
…being intelligent people with high levels of intuition, they sense the obvious: That in a higher tax nation, whatever company they may form will not have the aggregate workforce enthusiasm to outmatch their competitors in other nations. Why? Because they can sense that a society that takes from the competent to subsidize the mediocre has less aggregate productivity enthusiasm compared to a society with less adulterated effort-reward curves. So entrepreneurs do not even start a company in such flatter effort-reward curve nations — knowing full well that in the end they will fail, unable to compete with more motivated people in other jurisdictions.
Sure in the multitude of entrepreneurs there are some that would not mind creating a company in France where they can keep forty percent of their income compared to California where they can keep forty eight percent. As a matter of fact, tax rates for the top, most highly compensated people are not that different on both sides of the Atlantic. The difference is in the middle and upper-middle class. In Europe the middle and upper middle class is taxed at high rates too. Not so much in the US (for now, but getting there).
Apple Inc. has thus a slight aggregate cumulative enthusiasm advantage in its workforce, compared to its French competitor. The American Apple Inc. prospers in a virtuous cycle, the French one perishes in a death spiral. Small differentials in enthusiasm, productivity, and effort-reward curves have huge consequences in terms of success. A small extra load, can turn a virtuous cycle into a death spiral. What is the net aggregate percentage advantage of Apple Inc. compared to Samsung? Can Apple absorb even a five percent increase in costs (taxes, regulations, salaries, benefits…) and still outcompete Samsung? Small differences in aggregate enthusiasm and the value/cost ratio have huge consequences.
The French entrepreneur knows that and that is why he does not even start an Apple Inc. in France. Because he already knows that he will fail. That is why there is no Apple Inc. in France in the first place.
Many leftists perhaps understand economic efficiency but simply want to promote a “fairer” world, even if less economically efficient. What they fail to understand is that economic efficiency is not measured in percentage, but rather in ORDERS of magnitude.
Consider:
I. A manual worker digging with a shovel
II. A bulldozer operator digging with a bulldozer displacing one thousand shovelfuls per minute
III. A bulldozer factory owner building hundreds of bulldozers per year each displacing one thousand shovelfuls per minute
IV. A bulldozer entrepreneur innovator building dozens of factories building hundreds of bulldozers per year each displacing one thousand shovelfuls per minute
The productivity difference between I and IV is not a percentage, …or double, triple, quadruple. It is orders of magnitude!!
You can make a society based on I. as fair as you want. It will still be a wretched and desperately less prosperous world compared to IV. The future, and prosperity many orders of magnitude above, belongs to societies that respect, reward and admire IV.
France may be “fairer” (assuming redistribution is morally fair in the first place) but its going down the path of I. Switzerland is less “fair”, redistributes less, but is going up the path of IV.
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But none of this matters.
To the voter-lemming, a French redistribution dollar today is worth five perpetually growing entrepreneurship dollars in the future.
Decline in most of the world’s developed democracies will continue…
France: Growth trendline 0.5-1% (haven’t even achieved that recently, but let’s be optimistic…)
World: Growth trendline 4%
Result ? ? ? ? !
American voter-lemming conclusion: “We need to be more like France”
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P.S. Unfortunately the partial Greek reforms did not last – The Greek People elected a new HopNChange government to reverse the partial reforms, including re-establishment of the public media. The Greek parliament is now in the process of voting on the relevant public media re-introduction bill (but the news has not made it into English speaking media yet – probably crowded out by the bigger drama unfolding in Greek-EU negotiations).
Why is Greece, the Greek voters regressing?
Because the Greek voter–lemming decided that the reforms “did not work”. And they are partially right!
The meager reforms were at best enough to simply reign in Greek excesses and make Greece a little better, say like France. The net effect of the reforms would have been to arrest economic contraction from -2% annually to say 0% or +1%, not to turn Greece into a dynamic free capitalist economy. In a world that is growing by 4%, a +1% growth trendline still represents deterministic decline. It is this decline that Greek voter-lemmings are systemically experiencing — just like American voter-lemmings are starting to experience the growth deficit (America 2% growth trendline, World 4% growth trendline) that their policies of HopNChange towards a welfare state have brought about.
A similar scenario to Greece is now brewing and unfolding in Italy. The new government is in a very precarious position having foisted modest reforms upon an intractable majority of statist minded citizens. The people are grudgingly acquiescing for now, and expecting results! The results of such meager reforms might be, at best, to lift the Italian growth trendline from 0.5% to 1%. In a world traveling along at 4% annual growth trendline, it makes little difference whether Italy grows by 0.5% or 1%. Both rates constitute solid decline – albeit at a slightly lower pace.
Italians will soon lose patience with the “[meager] reforms” which are “not working”. They will soon vote like the Greeks. So will the Spaniards. The French, more or less, already have. Whatever is left of the northern minority wallets (Germany + Finland + a few others = 110 million citizens ) will be voted away by the unstoppable Southern majority juggernaut (France + Italy + Spain + Greece + a few others = 220 million citizens). Germans may have the economic power (or whatever its left since Germany too is riding a 2% growth trendline, surrounded by a world growing at 4%) but the south has majoritarian power to vote their wallets away. And they will. “Yes, they CAN!”
American voter-lemming conclusion: “We need to be more like Europe”…
Decline: Well rooted.
Few jurisdictions will escape. It is the natural cycle of voter-lemmings achieving prosperity and then suiciding.
In practical terms I’m interested in intuition and leading indicators as to which are the few nations that will escape this electoral trap.