A System Of Patronage So Vast - Road to the Middle Class

EVERY THREE months the excellent Theodore Dalrymple reports on the utter waste and degradation of the welfare state in Britain. And in the Winter 2007 edition of City Journal he explains how it really works. For he asks: How is it possible for the welfare state to sustain failure on such a massive scale?

It is simple, really. Failure is the whole point. It is failure that justifies the whole system, the pyramid of patronage we call the welfare state.

At the bottom of the heap is the failed underclass. Their failure justifies the vast social service bureaucracy; their continued failure justifies a bigger social service bureaucracy.

But that is just the start. For the failure concept works inside the bureaucracy. in his book Wasting Police Time, policeman

[David] Copperfield recounts how, in 1999, a police officer said to a black motorist, who did not answer a question, �Okay, so you�re deaf as well as black.� The report of the official inquiry into the subsequent complaint had 62 pages of attachments, 20 pages of witness statements, and 172 pages of interview transcripts. Legal and disciplinary proceedings took 19 months to complete.

Do you see the beauty of this? Think of the jobs, the promotions, the careers in that official inquiry. Think of the jobs, the promotions, the careers spawned by it in programs to combat the crisis of �institutional racism� in the police force. What�s the point of actually doing policing? Much better to be doing nice safe internal investigations.

There�s the mystery of why the government education system in both Britain and the United States have insisted on using the ineffective �whole language�" reading system for over a century instead of the proven �phonics.�

It�s simple really. What is the point of using a system like phonics that teaches children to read in six weeks? Where are the jobs, the pensions in that? Much better to use a failed method that requires remedial programs and studies and more funding to compensate for the expensive failures.

Higher up the food chain are the expensive consultants and their massive project failures.

[In] management consultant David Craig�s recent book, Plundering the Public Sector. Craig catalogs what at first sight seems the almost incredible incompetence of the British government in its efforts to �modernize� the public administration.

They have spent $60 billion (yes, billion) on an IT system for the National Health Service that doesn�t work. But that is not the real source of waste.

Projects routinely get canceled after $400� $500 million has been spent on them. Modernization in Britain�s public sector means delay and inefficiency procured at colossal expense.

But that�s the point, you see. What does it matter if the system is wasteful and expensive and the system gets canceled. It all greases the patronage system. The consultants still get paid, and demonstrate their appreciation in the traditional way.

This is all so obvious, that we should ask ourselves how come it took so long to figure it all out. In the immortal words of fictional silent screen star Lina Lamont: Are We Dumb or Something? Of course the whole thing is a big patronage system. That is what politicians do to get elected. Always have, always will.

The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

That is a long paragraph. So let us shorten it. When you think of the welfare state don�t think of the caring and the compassion. That is just window dressing. Think of the power and the patronage. Then everything starts to make sense.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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