In life, some problems arouse a lot of emotion but are not really important, while other critical problems escape attention. Even in our personal lives this sometimes leads to the mistake of spending a lot of energy on the unimportant instead of the important. In the life of nations this happens very often, and very often it leads to the failure of many reform efforts.
One such typical emotionally insignificant problem is the cost of government bureaucracy. It is humanly understandable that we should resent the fact that it takes seven bureaucrats to do a job that could be done by one (which usually does not mean that they are lazy, but that the procedures are unnecessarily complex), and the ostentatious waste of government at a time when the population is shrinking.
But this should not obscure the fact that the cost of civil servants’ salaries is not a major problem in relation to the overall budget, and certainly not a fatal one. A far more serious problem is the incompetence of the civil service.
If the state has a good industrial policy and Czech companies are flourishing, we can support 2,000 civil servants in 50 different state agencies. If the industrial policy is lousy and companies fail, even an office with a single civil servant is too expensive.
And so it is with everything. Current stupid plan to arm ourselves with pointless expenditure will remain a stupid plan even if the number of employees in the Ministry of Defence is reduced to one tenth. When the Ministry of Education is destroying the education system, it would not console us to cut the salaries of the ministerial apparatus.
We need a civil service that is efficient and manageable, not cheap.
