Counter-productive policy
1. VAT on private education is counter-productive: It makes private education more expensive, pushing more children into the state system, which increases the burden on taxpayers rather than relieving it. It discourages people from opting out of public provision, despite them already saving the state money by doing so.
2. Tariffs are counter-productive: They raise prices for consumers, reduce choice, and often invite retaliatory tariffs from other countries. While meant to “protect” domestic industries, they often shield inefficiency and distort markets.
3. Rent controls are counter-productive: Artificially low rents discourage landlords from renting or maintaining properties, leading to housing shortages and poor quality. They help some sitting tenants in the short term but reduce the availability and quality of housing in the long term and lead to long waiting lists for rental properties.
4. Subsidies are counter-productive: They often encourage inefficiency, waste, and dependency, and distort the real market price of goods and services.Taxpayers end up funding industries that may not be competitive or viable in domestic markets, let alone international ones.
5. Nationalization is counter-productive: Public ownership reduces efficiency, innovation, and accountability, since state-run enterprises are shielded from competition. And it often leads to political meddling, overstaffing, and underinvestment as state-owned businesses are usually run to benefit the producers rather than the consumers.
6. Over-regulation is counter-productive: It creates unnecessary compliance costs, discourages innovation, and raises barriers for small businesses.Regulations often protect entrenched players, making it difficult for competitors to enter the market, instead of protecting consumers, which defeats their stated purpose.
7. Tolerating petty crime is counter-productive: It undermines the rule of law, normalizes disorder, and can escalate into more serious crime, as set out in the ‘broken windows’ theory. Small crimes might seem harmless individually, but the cumulative effect damages communities and discourages investment.
8. Bottle tops that won’t come away from the bottle are counter-productive. Thethinking was to make us recycle the top along with the bottle instead of throwing it away in general refuse. But people can’t easily drink from the smaller bottles because the cap gets in the way, making them spill drink over their clothes or cutting their lip. That is why people tear off the tops and throw them away.
Each of the above can be argued to distort incentives, reduce efficiency, and produce outcomes opposite to those intended, making them counter-productive. Indeed, most of them are downright silly.
Madsen Pirie