TGIF: Efficient Bureaucracy?

With all the talk about government efficiency, it would be useful to remind ourselves why bureaucracies differ radically from for-profit businesses. Ludwig von Mises devoted a short but enlightening volume to this subject in 1944, Bureaucracy. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-chair the nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency, should do some homework by reading that book.

Mises, as an advocate of limited government, did not argue that bureaucracy has no place in a free society. In contrast to anarcho-capitalists, he thought government and therefore some bureaucracy was necessary to protect what he valued most: peaceful social cooperation through the division of labor—that is, the market economy. Violence against persons and property was clearly antithetical to the continuing welfare-enhancing collaboration we call the market process. But Mises did not want bureaucracies trying to do what free, private, and competitive enterprises could do better. Moreover, if the government went beyond its mere peacekeeping duties, it would undermine the market process and make us all less well off despite any good intentions.

Mises began by reminding readers (or perhaps teaching them from scratch) what the free market is and what it accomplishes. It's a great primer for those who lack the time to read his longer works. He wrote:

Capitalism or market economy is that system of social cooperation and division of labor that is based on private ownership of the means of production. The material factors of production are owned by individual citizens, the capitalists and the landowners. The plants and the farms are operated by the entrepreneurs and the farmers, that is, by individuals or associations of individuals who either themselves own the capital and the soil or have borrowed or rented them from the owners. Free enterprise is the characteristic feature of capitalism. The objective of every enterpriser—whether businessman or farmer—is to make profit.

The uninitiated might ask who runs things. He replied: "The capitalists, the enterprisers, and the farmers are instrumental in the conduct of economic affairs. They are at the helm and steer the ship."

However, let's not jump to conclusions about who really runs things, Mises advsed:

But [the capitalists, etc.] are not free to shape [the ship's] course. They are not supreme, they are steersmen only, bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer.

Neither the capitalists nor the entrepreneurs nor the farmers determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. The producers do not produce for their own consumption but for the market. They are intent on selling their products. If the consumers do not buy the goods offered to them, the businessman cannot recover the outlays made. He loses his money. If he fails to adjust his procedure to the wishes of the consumers, he will very soon be removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.

All the conventional controversy about bosses and workers overlooks the critical point:

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses.

Capitalism is not a profit system, Mises taught. It is a profit-and-loss system. If the consumers give thumbs down to a product, the entrepreneur could lose everything. He may have to seek a job from a superior entrepreneur.

The performance of businesses, Mises wrote, can be appraised only because private property in the means of production, free exchange, and the resulting money prices permit economic calculation and thus planning by economizing individuals. This was Mises's pathbreaking demolition of the economic case for central planning—socialism in its national and international forms—over a century ago.

Economic calculation matters when comparing a business to a bureaucracy. As Mises wrote:

The manager of the whole [business] concern hands over an aggregate to the newly appointed branch manager and gives him one directive only: Make profits. This order, the observance of which is continuously checked by the accounts, is sufficient to make the branch a subservient part of the whole concern and to give to its manager’s action the direction aimed at by the central manager....

As success or failure to attain this end can be ascertained by accounting not only for the whole business concern but also for any of its parts, it is feasible to decentralize both management and accountability without jeopardizing the unity of operations and the attainment of their goal. Responsibility can be divided. There is no need to limit the discretion of subordinates by any rules or regulations other than that underlying all business activities, namely, to render their operations profitable.

What about a bureaucracy? The answer is implicit in what has already been stated. By nature a bureaucracy faces no profit-and-loss test. It has money expenses in a market-oriented society: it hires willing workers and buys equipment and supplies from willing vendors. However, it does not offer its output to potential consumers, that is, people who are free to say no and take their money elsewhere. Instead of consumers, a bureaucracy has taxpayers, who must pay whether they want the output or not. This disconnect must have far-ranging consequences. (Government services for which user fees are charged differ in this respect, but the government typically forbids competition.)

Instead of the business directive "Make profits," Mises wrote:

Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do. His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them....

The absence of the seller-buyer relationship makes a big difference:

The objectives of public administration cannot be measured in monetary terms and cannot be checked by accountancy methods.... In public administration there is no connection between revenue and expenditure....

In public administration there is no market price for achievements....

Now we are in a position to provide a definition of bureaucratic management: Bureaucratic management is the method applied in the conduct of administrative affairs the result of which has no cash value on the market. Remember: We do not say that a successful handling of public affairs has no value, but that it has no price on the market, that its value cannot be realized in a market transaction and consequently cannot be expressed in terms of money....

Bureaucratic management is management of affairs which cannot be checked by economic calculation.

This would be a valuable lesson for Musk and Ramaswamy to take to heart. Their task should not be primarily to search for ways to make the bureaucracies more efficient. Rather their task ought to be to identify those current functions the government should not be performing, those that should be turned over to free, private, profit-motivated, and competitive enterprise. We ought to replace coercion with consent.

We must, in other words, revisit the question: what is the proper role of government, if any, in a society that aspires to be free?

More Mises on the Market

"The capitalists, the enterprisers, and the farmers are instrumental in the conduct of economic affairs. They are at the helm and steer the ship. But they are not free to shape its course. They are not supreme, they are steersmen only, bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer.

"Neither the capitalists nor the entrepreneurs nor the farmers determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. The producers do not produce for their own consumption but for the market. They are intent on selling their products. If the consumers do not buy the goods offered to them, the businessman cannot recover the outlays made. He loses his money. If he fails to adjust his procedure to the wishes of the consumers, he will very soon be removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.

"The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction. They bother neither about the vested interests of capitalists nor about the fate of the workers who lose their jobs if as consumers they no longer buy what they used to buy."

—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, 1944

TGIF: Where the Socialists Go Wrong

Since socialism is "in" today -- even though many people who say they favor it have no idea what it is -- F. A. Hayek's last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), is worth checking out. Hayek, the late great Nobel-laureate economist of the Austrian school, begins this way:

This book argues that our civilisation depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism. To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection -- the comparative increase of population and wealth -- of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be 'fruitful, and multiply...' This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

Socialists take a different view of these matters.

Well, that last sentence is quite an understatement. By socialism Hayek didn't mean the welfare state or continuing government efforts to manipulate market outcomes according to some notion of equity. That would be interventionism or the mixed economy. No, socialism is the abolition of the market order and its necessary condition, private property: the replacement of free private enterprise with centralized bureaucracy. Let's cut to the chase:

The main point of my argument is, then, that the conflict between, on one hand, advocates of the spontaneous extended human order created by a competitive market, and on the other hand those who demand a deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based on collective command over available resources is due to a factual error by the latter about how knowledge of these resources is and can be generated and utilised. As a question of fact, this conflict must be settled by scientific study. Such study shows that, by following the spontaneously generated moral traditions underlying the competitive market order (traditions which do not satisfy the canons or norms of rationality embraced by most socialists), we generate and garner greater knowledge and wealth than could ever be obtained or utilised in a centrally-directed economy whose adherents claim to proceed strictly in accordance with 'reason'. Thus socialist aims and programmes are factually impossible to achieve or execute; and they also happen, into the bargain as it were, to be logically impossible.

Hayek is saying that once we understand how information about resources is produced and transmitted, we realize that central planners can't deliver the goods. Socialism can't keep its (earlier) promises of plenty. (Nor of justice, but that's for another time.)

Here Hayek extended Ludwig von Mises's fatal critique of socialism; namely, that

1. without tradeable private property in the means of production, markets for resources and producers' goods don't exist;
2. without such markets, true prices can't exist; and
3. without prices, rational economic calculation is impossible;
4. therefore, socialism is impossible; it's "planned chaos."

By impossible Mises meant that without genuine money prices resulting from free exchanges, the millions of disparate resources and goods could not be accorded a common unit of account, and therefore rational decision-making about what ought to be produced, how much should be produced, and the best methods of production is foreclosed. In a world of scarcity with a growing population, that is bad news indeed.

When the socialists responded to Mises that planners could simulate market prices with computers and bureaucratic trial and error, Hayek said, No, they can't because what makes true and informative prices happen -- producer and consumer free choice in an environment with widely dispersed and ever-changing local and often tacit knowledge about resources and preferences -- is beyond any central planner's reach. In what Hayek called "the great society" -- which is marked by extended cooperation with countless strangers rather than the earlier, primitive face-to-face tribal relations -- spontaneous coordination via the price system is the name of the game, literally a matter of life and death.

Thus Mises identified the "calculation problem," and Hayek the complementary "knowledge problem." The Mises-Hayek tag team was triumphant. When the Soviet Union dismantled itself, the American socialist economist Robert Heilbroner declared, "Mises was right."

As a result, newer generations of socialists gave up their goal of outproducing the market in favor of the "era of limits." In effect they said: "It's good that socialism can't outproduce the market. Affluence is bad for the planet, so the last thing we should want is for the people of the developing world to achieve our sinfully high living standards. Better that we should produce far less according to the instructions of trusted, saintly, and omniscient bureaucrats, who will distribute the output more caringly than profit-driven impersonal and spontaneous market forces could ever do."

And would you like to buy a bridge cheap? Back to Hayek.

The demands of socialism are not moral conclusions derived from the traditions that formed the extended order that made civilisation possible. Rather, they endeavour to overthrow these traditions by a rationally designed moral system whose appeal depends on the instinctual appeal of its promised consequences. They assume that, since people had been able to generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts, they must also be able to design an even better and more gratifying system. But if humankind owes its very existence to one particular rule-guided form of conduct of proven effectiveness, it simply does not have the option of choosing another merely for the sake of the apparent pleasantness of its immediately visible effects. The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.

Many people with whom I share a deep loathing of war and surveillance apparently get a warm cozy feeling from the word socialism. I suspect it's because they've never encountered Hayek's point, much less examined it. That's a shame. They have nothing to lose but their self-forged chains.

TGIF: Governments Create Problems; Markets Fix Them

My article "Complete Liberalism" prompted an unexpected challenge. An interlocutor, who says he owns a business and thus is not antibusiness, claimed that my article suggested that, unlike government regulators, businesses never get things wrong. Yet business failures outnumber successes 10,000 to one, this person said, for all kinds of reasons, both innocent and malign, including a desire to pull the wool over consumers' eyes for as long as possible.

The problem with the comment is that my article never claimed that business people always get it right or are always virtuous. I've pointed out repeatedly that the best economists -- especially the Austrian economists -- never ignore the inherent existence of error in describing how markets work. And libertarian writers have never suggested that business owners cannot have bad intentions, which are magnified by access to state power. Quite the contrary! What these thinkers have emphasized are the systematic incentives and disincentives produced by free competition that reward pro-consumer performance and penalize incompetence and malevolence. Think of all the libertarian criticism of the malignant relationship between business and government. Now think of Ayn Rand's businessmen-villains in Atlas Shrugged.

One need only read the accessible writings of Ludwig von Mises ("Profit and Loss," Bureaucracy), F. A. Hayek ("The Use of Knowledge in Society," "Competition as a Discovery Process"), or Israel Kirzner ("Economics and Error") to see that the plague of uncertainty, error, and incomplete and dispersed knowledge figures heavily in good economic analysis. The question they sought to answer is: how can people coordinate their productive social cooperation in the face of such ignorance? Individual freedom produces the only answer for a great society: prices.

In fact, if it weren't for imperfect knowledge, free markets would be unnecessary and profit and loss would disappear. Mises wrote:

If all people were to anticipate correctly the future state of the market, the entrepreneurs would neither earn any profits nor suffer any losses.... What makes profit emerge is the fact that the entrepreneur who judges the future prices of the products more correctly than other people do buys some or all of the factors of production at prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too low....

On the other hand, the entrepreneur who misjudges the future prices of the products allows for the factors of production prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too high. His total costs of production exceed the prices at which he can sell the product. This difference is entrepreneurial loss.

It's hard to believe that an economist who writes about entrepreneurs with correct or incorrect judgments about the future could have thought that business owners were infallible. Economic analysis, after all, is supposed to be about real human beings who, whether they are acting as producers or consumers, are fallible.

The free-market position is that free and competitive markets are not perfect but better than government bureaucracies at detecting and correcting errors about what consumers will want and what they will be willing to pay. That's what counts, isn't it? Since omniscience is not an option, we want the best method available. That's all we can hope for, and it turns out not to be too bad. We must always ask about any touted solution to a problem: compared to what? Thomas Sowell's Law -- "There are no solutions, There are only tradeoffs" -- is relevant here.

David D. Friedman is another important scholar who has shed light on the relative merits of bureaucracies and markets in his important article "Do We Need a Government?" (I recommend his video lecture.) Friedman addresses a different matter than the one I'm concerned with, namely, the collective-action problem, one manifestation of which is called "market failure." But much of what he writes applies. Here's the key, which is about systematic incentives:

In private markets, most of the time, an individual who makes a decision bears most, although not all, of the resulting costs, and receives most of the resulting benefits. In political markets that is rarely true. So we should expect that the market failure that results from A taking an action most of whose costs or benefits are born by B, C, and D should be the exception in the private market, the rule in the political market. It follows that shifting control over human activities from the private market to the political market is likely to increase the problems associated with market failure, not decrease them.

This shouldn't be controversial. We experience this as shoppers when we spend our own money on the very goods we then bring home and use, and as voters, where the disconnect among choices, costs, and benefits is stark. This has critical implications for both business owners and bureaucrats. A fundamental contribution of public-choice theory is that the normal principles of human action apply to government employees. Bureaucracies are filled with ambitious people too, so this is only fair. They don't become sainted creatures with perfect knowledge and perfect virtue merely because they step across the threshold and take government jobs. 

Incentives matter, as we all know first-hand. The same human being operating in two different institutional environments should be expected to behave differently. And indeed they do.

In a competitive -- that is, free -- market a business owner's mistake or bad conduct is someone else's chance to make a profit. Because entrepreneurs know this, they are on the lookout for errors. "Hence in a market society," Friedman writes, "there is an incentive for private parties to find ways around the inefficiencies due to market failure."

Nothing is more powerful than the profit motive, something that even opponents of the market readily concede.

The same incentive is not to be found in bureaucracies, which are not profit-and-loss organizations. Most important, bureaucrats don't have the price information that entrepreneurs have. Their revenue is obtained by force -- taxation -- and their "products" are not offered on markets where prospective buyers can pass them by for competing offerings. That's an entirely different ballgame from market activity.

Notice that bureaucratic failures are routinely portrayed as market failures (most people's economic ignorance leaves them gullible) and are used to justify even more government: larger budgets, bigger staff, and wider powers. If (alleged) market failures require more government, as some people believe, how can government failures require, not more markets, but more government?

We should want the incentives for spotting and fixing errors to be as undiluted as possible. The way to achieve that is to keep the government from interfering with people's peaceful activities.

Does Trump Know Anything?

If Trump really wanted to run the government like a business, he'd have to abolish taxation and offer government's purported services in a competitive marketplace. Without competition and a true profit-and-loss test, government cannot be like a business. Prospective buyers must be free to say no to sellers and to go elsewhere if they wish -- and I don't mean to another country.

TGIF: Putting Bureaucracy First: Rachel Maddow’s Progressivism

Today’s TGIF examines the political thought of the likes of Rachel Maddow:

Progressives today say people should come before profits. Now in a privilege-ridden corporate state, that’s a worthy goal, though Progressives have no clue how to achieve it. How nice it would be if they were equally committed to putting people before bureaucracy. Here they fall down rather badly because their signature ideas would subordinate regular people to the dictates of the power structure.

Read it here. Reason.com is now posting TGIF. You can see the latest here.
Some other recent writings:
TGIF: “Back to Basics” – No volition, no discourse. No discourse, no denying volition. Ergo volition.
Op-ed: “What Immigration Problem?”