Browse > Home / Economics, Welfare State / Cutting up the cake

| Subcribe via RSS



Cutting up the cake

March 22nd, 2011 Posted in Economics, Welfare State by

For better or ill, the political settlement that Western liberal democracies have means that the government of the day decides how to cut the cake. That cake is cut according to the size of government borrowing, what its spending priorities are and the demands of the public as voiced by pressure groups.

If the cake is reduced there is less to cut and hand around. If you wish to give out more but have a small cake you need to find ways of making it bigger. This is a continuous challenge and leads to fierce arguments about post code lotteries and fairness.

During the last 30 years we have seen some steps to alter this. While the government may make the cut someone else hands out the goodies or administers the transfer. There have been attempts at getting the recipients to make more decisions about the services they get. This trend is continuing and is likely to grow as successive governments face tough fiscal decisions.

There is another way of distributing products and services. One of the best devices at crowdsourcing public demand emerged centuries ago. But making the price signalling of the open market function within public services is not easy.

The coalition is clearly using that policy tool to reshape the relationship between the citizen and the State. It will take some time before we know if they have achieved  that aim.

Comments are closed.