From time to time taxation apologists propagate the urban myth that, “You get when you pay for when you pay your taxes”. Most recently, Hugh Mackenzie, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, wrote this in the Torstar group of papers, including the Hamilton Spectator.
Actually, we quite often don’t get what we pay for, especially in government services.
Mackenzie uses three dangerous hidden assumptions:
that all government services are needed;
that all are delivered efficiently;
that politicians and bureaucrats know better how to spend your money than you do.
Examples are plentiful:
Having blown a billion dollars on eHealth, the Ontario government is starting again and will have it done, they say, in six years. Since any systems project scheduled for more than six months lasts forever, we are scheduled to be paying for eHealth permanently at the rate of $150M per year, with no results. I recently received a free replacement telephone answering device for one that was faulty; do you suppose we could get our tax money back for the eHealth fiasco?
Then there is the patch of 23 Burlington schools a few years back, in which the best performing schools had much lower costs per pupil than the lowest performing. In private industry, this happens frequently, and the lowest performers go out of business; but a government enterprise doesn’t go under, it need only dig a little deeper into our pockets. Occasionally Canadian schools have been taken over or closed because they were costing too much; but who has heard of a public school being closed because of the low quality of its product?
If we get what we pay for, why do some prosperous European nations operate health care systems less costly than ours, with no waiting lines, and outcomes better than ours?
Occasionally we get nothing at all, good or bad, for our taxes. Human Resources Development Canada once misplaced a billion dollars. The responsible minister escaped accounting for it when he was moved to another Ministry; and parliamentary tradition is that a relocated politician's errors and accountabilities are left behind him. In private business, an employee who "misplaced" one thousandth of that much money could well find himself jobless and in court.
Then there’s the gun registry ... oh, dear, let’s not go there.
In sharp contrast, there is the routine performance of private industry, proven in any issue of Consumer Reports, which will have at least one instance where the three best performing products are lower in cost than the three worst. See the November, 2009 issue.
We must not assume that “we get what we pay for”, either in government services or the open market, because we very frequently do not, especially from government. When considering government operations, the safest course is to presume that one or all of the three hidden assumptions above are in play.
Frank Gue is a retired professional electronics engineer living in Burlington, Ontario.
He is widely published on economics, factory management, aerodynamics, electronics, and politics.
He has been a political and education activist for many years, and has served as President, Education Chair, and Policy Chair in both Provincial and Federal parties. He was the founding president of the Halton Taxpayers Coalition.
Frank can be reached at: frank.gue@cogeco.ca
