If the watchword of the market economy is profit, the watchword of bureaucracy is growth. How are these respective objectives to be achieved? The way to attain profit in a market economy is to beat the competitors in the dynamic, ever-changing process of satisfying consumer demands in the best possible way: to create a self-service supermarket instead of the older grocery store (even a chain store), or to create a Polaroid or a Xerox process. In other words, to produce concrete goods or services that consumers will be willing to pay for. But to attain growth, the bureaucratic manager must convince the legislature or planning board that his service will, in some vague way, aid the “public interest” or the “general welfare.” Since the taxpayer is forced to pay, there is not only no incentive or reason for the bureaucrat to be efficient; there is no way that a bureaucrat, even with the most eager will in the world, can find out what the consumers want and how to meet their demands. Users pay little or nothing for the service, and even if they do, investors are not allowed to experience profit or loss from investing in producing that service. Therefore, the consumers will simply have to allow the bureaucrats to bestow their services upon them, whether the consumers like it or not. In building and operating a dam, for example, the government is bound to be inefficient, to subsidize some citizens at the expense of others, to misallocate resources, and generally to be at sea without a rudder in supplying the service. Moreover, for some citizens, the dam may not be a service at all; in the jargon of economists, for some people, the dam may be a “bad” not a “good”. Thus, for environmentalists who are philosophically opposed to dams, or to farmers and homeowners whose property may be confiscated and flooded by the Dam Authority, this “service” is clearly a negative one. What is to happen to their rights and properties? Thus, government action is not only bound to be inefficient, and coercive against taxpayers; it is also bound to be redistributive for some groups at the expense of others.

It is intriguing that left-liberals invariably castigate advertising on the market for being shrill, for being misleading, and for artificially “creating” consumer demand. And yet, advertising is the indispensable method by which vital information is conveyed to the consumer — about the nature and quality of the product, and about its price and where it is offered. Oddly enough, liberals never level their critiques on the one area where they do strongly apply: the propaganda, the public relations, the hokum, put out by government. The difference is that all market advertising is soon put to a direct test: does this radio or TV work? But with government, there is no such direct consumer test: there is no way in which the citizen or voter can figure out rapidly how a specific policy worked. Furthermore, in elections, the voter is not presented with a specific program to consider: he must choose between a package deal of a legislator or chief executive for X number of years, and he is stuck for that period of time. And since there is no direct policy test, we arrive at the commonly deplored failure of the modern democratic process to discuss issues or policy, but instead to concentrate on television demagogy.2