Réforme ou rupture ?

Dans le Financial Times, Jamie Whyte explique pourquoi la rupture (la vraie) vaut toujours mieux que qu'une lente réforme :

Aspiring liberalisers cannot afford to be incrementalists. Taking the slow road to your destination merely gives vested interests more opportunities to resist and increases the chance that, like Mr Blair, you will be replaced at the wheel by someone who knows exactly where to find the reverse gear. Worse, incrementalism is itself a commitment to the managerialism that liberalisers supposedly oppose. For who will administer all the micro-initiatives that lie on the long and winding road to the reform destination? Bureaucrats, of course. Mr Blair’s itsy-bitsy reform agenda has increased the number of government administrators by about half a million.

Dramatic, not slow, remedies are the best way

By Jamie Whyte

Published: May 1 2008 19:11 | Last updated: May 1 2008 19:11

Some of my friends have an annoying habit. They phone and ask if I can do them an absolutely enormous favour. Then the favour turns out to be tiny: looking after little Johnny for an hour on Saturday or picking up some dry-cleaning.

Politicians have a similarly annoying habit. They claim to have big plans for reforming the tax or welfare system. Then it turns out that all they intend to do is lift the threshold for inheritance tax or tighten the qualifications for a sickness benefit.

On Tuesday, Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, asked his cabinet for fresh legislative ideas to include in the autumn Queen’s Speech. We know what to expect: lots of big talk about renewal and bold initiatives, and lots of little ideas.

Why would the supposedly understated British indulge in such exaggeration? Signalling is my guess. No one wants a friend who asks for big favours. By calling small favours huge, my friends are reassuring me that they will not ask for anything truly big. Similarly, by describing tinkering as radical reform, politicians signal their caution. They know that voters are conservative. They enjoy grandiose rhetoric but they regard significant departures from the policy status quo as a sign of dangerous lunacy.

This is unfortunate. Tinkering is the right approach when policies are already basically right, but that is an unusual circumstance. The devil is rarely in the detail. Which detail is the devil with the Common Agricultural Policy? How might we fine-tune the National Health Service so that resources are allocated efficiently without the help of consumer prices? What tinkering with the “war on drugs” will stop it being a waste of time?

Voters’ conservatism is based not on the near-perfection of the status quo, but on two common errors. The first is a tendency to judge policy by comparison with the past and with other countries. If things are better here and now, current policy must be pretty good.

This sets an absurdly low standard. What is so good about our predecessors and foreigners that we should count outdoing them as having policies in no need of serious improvement? Had engineers applied this standard to their work, we would still be trundling around in horse-drawn carts.

This standard also allows a plethora of failings to be disguised by a single success. Since we began doing science properly, our standard of living has improved, even if we get worse at public policy. The massive improvements in agricultural productivity caused by 20th-century science, for example, have disguised the less massive decline caused by subsidies and tariffs.

The second mistake encouraging policy moderation is the idea that bold reform is impractical, and that to get things done you must work towards your goal in a series of small steps.

It is a mystery why so many people believe this, when history suggests the opposite. Former prime minister Tony Blair’s programme of incremental public services reform took 10 years to achieve nothing. He left office having reintroduced the grant-maintained schools and NHS internal market that he abolished on taking power. And these were policy fudges to begin with.

By contrast, as a teenager I witnessed the transformation of New Zealand’s economy in just a few years: industry deregulated, agricultural subsidies and tariffs eliminated, currency controls abolished, a sales tax introduced and the top rate of income tax reduced from 66 to 33 per cent. Similarly dramatic reforms occurred in Britain and America during the 1980s. Many found them shocking but they got done, and few would reverse them.

Aspiring liberalisers cannot afford to be incrementalists. Taking the slow road to your destination merely gives vested interests more opportunities to resist and increases the chance that, like Mr Blair, you will be replaced at the wheel by someone who knows exactly where to find the reverse gear.

Worse, incrementalism is itself a commitment to the managerialism that liberalisers supposedly oppose. For who will administer all the micro-initiatives that lie on the long and winding road to the reform destination? Bureaucrats, of course. Mr Blair’s itsy-bitsy reform agenda has increased the number of government administrators by about half a million.

Some say the advertised moderation of David Cameron’s opposition Conservative party is a cunning ruse. If elected they will return to Thatcherite “slash and burn”. Let us hope so. It is the only effective way of clearing overgrown forests of government.

The writer is author of Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking (Corvo)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008