One of those superfically attractive answers to our collective problems is doing the rounds again. A possibly general feeling that we’re not getting the quality of MP that we deserve and therefore we should raise the price we’re willing to pay and thus gain better ones. This modern world is sufficiently complex to govern that the sort of duffers who think £80k a year is a good income just won’t cut it any more. Therefore pay proper wages and gain those better. Say, oooh, £250k a year?
Well, it’s an idea.
Now, we’ve read our Hayek and know that the problem isn’t the quality of MP, it’s that the modern world is complex and therefore cannot be governed in any detail. The best that can be done is to set the general and base rules and then society is what we end up with from having got those right.
But, OK, all too many have not read Hayek nor understood his point.
So, what we need is an experiment. Those are difficult in economics as it’s terribly difficult to produce a control group, those the change doesn’t happen to, for comparison. We must therefore look for a natural experiment.
Which we do in fact have. For we pay the managers of local councils - not the councillors, the managers - those two to four times what we pay MPs. The result is as we see at Croydon, Birmingham and so on, organisations crumbling into bankruptcy as a result of the decisions taken by those nicely expensive managers.
A beautiful theory killed, once again, by an ugly fact.
Even if Hayek is not right, in that it is theoretically possible to manage in detail but we’re just not using the right people, we find that Britain still cannot be managed in detail because Britain doesn’t contain that management talent necessary to manage in detail.
Thus raising MPs’ wages will not make Britain better governed it’ll just make it more expensively governed. Which, given that we’re at a post-war high for the portion of the economy that flows through said government already doesn’t sound like a desirable - nor even viable - solution.
The necessity therefore becomes reducing the complexity of societal management - and economic, of course - down to where the available talent is capable of doing it. As you might have guessed given our views that means something between Singapore on Thames and radical laissez faire. Not because these are the policies that will make us richer - tho’ they are - or freer - they are - or even those which are logically and ethically correct - which they again are. But because the Rolls Royce minds of this country are incapable of managing anything more than that.
Hey, science is science, experimental outcomes are experimental outcomes and we do, really, have to respect the science. Don’t increase MP pay to try to attract that talent we’ve not got. Cut government to where the duffers can do it.