Thinking Beyond the Welfare State

As Tony Blair heads for the exits conservative Brits are thinking about what the Conservative Party should offer against the high-tax high regulation, badly-run public services of New Labour Britain.

Iain Martin has a go.  From Tony Blair’s expected successor, Gordon Brown, we can expect “a bit less of the same,” the refrain of Clinton and Blair.  He’ll continue with the welfare state only it will be better managed.

High taxation will continue, our Armed Forces will be overstretched and real reform of public services postponed.

Conservatives need to offer the genuine alternative to this slow death by unreformed government bureaucracy.  They need to offer

a revival of social responsibility, relying on free institutions rather than Labour’s big state... and dramatic improvement in the lives of the poorest, who are currently held back by welfarism, violent crime and woeful education.

This points out the real issue with regard to the welfare state.  Suppose the Brits achieved “real reform of public services” tomorrow.  It’s unrealistic, of course, because of the power of public service providers to resist any reform, real or otherwise.

That would mean that the public services are organized to deliver public services in the context of 2007.  They will still be organized to deliver those services 2007-style in 2017, 2027, 2037, and so on.  When, do you think, would they get to be reformed again?  Not for a generation, at least.  Probably not for 50 years.

But that is the optimistic scenario, assuming that the public services got a full reform today.  In reality schools, health care, and welfare will continue unreformed, based on the ideas of fifty or a hundred years ago.

That is why they must be refomed and replaced by free and flexible institutions.  Until then the inflexible, unreformable big state will go on being inflexible and unreformable.