Free exchange

Waste is (sometimes) good for you

Best not to grow the public labour force too much

CHARLEMAGNE describes the process of picking up a press badge for a European Union summit. It's gloriously bureaucratic:

Each journalist gets their own security escort , who takes your passport and press pass, plus a deeply pointless four page form authorising the Belgian government to keep your name and address on some database, and escorts you all of two metres to a desk manned by three more guards. They look on a computer and discover (in my case) that this is something like my 20th EU summit and my details have not changed, at which point they intone "normal", and the escort takes back the passes, walks you to a pair of officials who check your passport is not a fake, then walks you a crucial last metre and a half to a desk manned by still more guards who give you your... Anyway, you get the picture.

He laments the waste before noting that in today's economy, deployment of such waste is considered a good thing. Governments are obviously trying to spend stimulus money as effectively as possible, but the goal is to put resources back to work, however that can be achieved. And of course, in recession the crowding out effect of overmanning is diminsihed.

Still, the value of choosing stimulus projects that are worthwhile in any case is that it then becomes less important if those projects don't wind down immediately when recovery begins. By contrast, if hundreds of thousands of workers were employed digging holes and filling them in, or escorting journalists around, or fighting a war, you'd want to make sure that those workers could rejoin the private sector as soon as possible after recovery began. The value to the public of those jobs, outside of recession, is extremely limited.

Anyway, all of this is really an excuse for me to note one of the great work-making, innovation-stifling laws of all time—the British Locomotive Act of 1865:

The Locomotive Act [was] introduced by the British parliament as one of a series of measures to control the use of mechanically propelled vehicles on British public highways during the latter part of the 19th century. This act required any motorised vehicle to be preceded by a man with a red flag.

The distribution of labour has important direct and indirect effects. Best not to get the government too into the business of directly employing workers as stimulus.

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