Why not just reverse the first government mistake?
A continual complaint of ours is that when government does something wrong, makes a mistake - and my, how unusual is that? - the reaction just never is to reverse the mistake. It’s to layer upon the error some other complex Heath Robinson which is just as, if not more, likely to then go wrong.
Gregg said the rising number of young people leaving education and going straight onto benefits was a “ticking time bomb”.
His solution is to give them a job with their wages paid by the state. “For this kind of group, 16, or 17, I believe that we need to be saying that if you’re offering a job with training that the state will meet the wage costs,” he said, stressing he was speaking in a personal capacity.
But we already solved this problem, didn’t we? We taxed every employer large employer in the country so that the state could then hand out goodies to those who hire apprentices. Ah, yes, that’s when found out that nationalisation - industrial policy with strong conditionalities - causes shortages. Ho hum, so why not reverse that error? For adding that level of bureaucracy really did not work - so why add another?
We could even mutter that perhaps we should downgrade some (say, 90%?) of the current universities back to Technical colleges so that they can do the day release schemes again. For the at least insinuation here is that Mr. Sharpe should be back doing Meat One and Gas Two at Fenlands.
This is generalising from the specific, of course it is. Why is it that politics never can - certainly never does - say “Ooops, sorry!” and reverse errors? And in that specific why isn’t government abolishing all control of, management of and contact with apprenticeships and the training of young workers? You know, given how good they’ve shown themselves to be so far?
We could even expand the critique. It was a prediction of ours that employment costs - a higher minimum wage, taxes on employment and so on - would be first felt by the young, untrained and untried in their inability to get that vital first job. So why not try reversing those errors too?
Ah, that’s right, government never does repeal mistakes, does it? Rather an argument for minarchy that, never allow the buggers to do anything as they’ll never retreat from whatever foolishness they do.
Tim Worstall