Big government = remote government

Whether or not the UK's 'special liquidity scheme' is actually a taxpayer-funded bailout, it's clear that big organisations can afford to be out of touch in ways that small businesses and ordinary people cannot. Big companies can influence government in all sorts of ways. They often receive subsidies, or protection from imports. They can manipulate the regulatory environment in such a way as to impose disproportionately higher compliance costs on smaller enterprises. And if they are banks, they are deemed 'too big to fail' and governments fall over themselves to rescue them with funds from taxpayers. Smaller businesses have to respond to the market. Big business distorts the market.

But what happens when the big organisation is in fact the government? Now that government increasingly dominates our economic, social and environmental sectors, we can look forward to a whole new set of problems. Big government is remote, out-of-touch government. It works in the same way as a big corporation. If it can't sell its policies it can impose them. Its size insulates it from day-to-day reality. Bureaucratic logic has a momentum of its own, and dreadful policies have a powerful interest group in the people who get to administer them. Big government is cumbersome, monolithic and, ultimately, contemptuous of the people its supposed to serve. All this is not to say that people working for government bodies are the same. It's the system that is at fault, not the individuals caught up in it.

When organisations are big they have underlying objectives other than their stated ones. The over-arching organisational objective is self-perpetuation. Smaller companies survive and prosper by meeting market demands. Big government issues streams of targets that sound worthwhile but are essentially about reinforcing and expanding the role of government. There's hardly a single example of governments holding themselves responsible for achieving a meaningful, worthwhile outcome of value to ordinary people. Instead we get Mickey Mouse micro-objectives, like compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, or smaller waiting lists for hospitals, that have nothing to do with real people, and everything to do with control.