Looks like I was right again!

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The estimable Tim Worstall reports on a study into lobbying:

So lobbying is definitely worth the cost to the people doing the lobbying: as The Economist notes, it might well be the most profitable thing a company spends money on.

And, dear reader you will remember my little theory of marketing (we spend the money where we get the best return):

Now, so long as Government takes it upon itself to regulate the behaviour of businesses, it will always be in the interest of those businesses – alone or collectively – to target government rather than to target the buying public. Think about it for a minute – for £1 million pound in donations to the minister’s favorite charity (at present using the name Labour Party) and a hint of lucrative future consultancy employment you can get the Government to change the law protecting your industry from new entrants, innovation and foreign competition.

So you see lobby works - from the perspective of the marketer if not from the perspective of the poor benighted consumer! And, so long as government has the power and the cash, we will continue to lobby for our self-interest to be promoted by that government. Perhaps the solution really does lie in reducing the power of government to control our lives, lower taxes and less regulation. The alternative, dare I say it, is corruption and the repeat of the very problems that got us all into this current mess.

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Things you don't often read in the Guardian...

Not being (which won't surprise you dear reader) a regular Guardian reader, I'd not seen anything by Dave Clements. And I guess I would - in my intolerance - have simply labelled him another trendy lefty public sector worker. Today though he wrote this:

With the exception of those whose livelihoods depend on it – reportedly half a million took to the streets in March – there has been a notable absence of opposition to the cuts from the wider public. The funny thing is that for all the official plaudits, nobody dare mention the apparent indifference of the supposed beneficiaries of public services. The institutions borne of the welfare state are far from “cherished”, as the leader of the opposition would have us believe. If anything, they are endured because of the lack of an alternative.

I think Dave's got it about right there - in my recent election campaign, the "cuts" were only mentioned by those facing possible redundancy (a feeling and experience I was able to understand having been in that situation up to Christmas - when possibility became reality). I was also struck by Dave's questioning of the statist norm:

It is not so much that the state is a drain on private enterprise; it is more that the political culture it gives expression to inhibits social enterprise. It crowds out – to borrow a phrase – the social action on which a healthy society is dependent. If we are to revive the public service ethos and defend public services that people need and want, we must first develop a respect for people’s autonomy and begin to recognise their capacity to run their own lives.

It seems to me that this position - rejecting the controlling Fabian state - represents the opening for a new politics where autonomy and liberty are given. A politics that embraces left and right, debates the merits of collective and individual rights and argues about the balance between personal choice and community power but does all this in the context of a much smaller state.

If more on the left embrace this option - and there are many, I don't doubt, who share Dave Clements' view - we might stumble towards a society less helpless in the face of officialdom, less dependent on the state, more grown up in its independence and less prepared to be pushed about by government, big business or their agents. We might get closer to sorting out our own problems - to that mystic place where 'Big Society' is real rather than something teetering close to being just a differentiating slogan.

I guess I can dream a little!

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