Given the current time of change it's worth thinking about what we want from the government. Yes, of course, if it could just solve all our problems, make everything nice, that would be good. But, that's not going to happen. So, what's the minimum we should be looking for?
I would insist that the minimum is that the government be efficient. The tale of the mobile phone thief beaten up by the mob is an example for us. It seems he was mentally unbalanced, worthy of care and attention, rather than violence. But more generally, as Messrs Siam and Tamjid point out in this newspaper, we're seeing mobocracy at present. And that's the thing which we desire government efficiency for -- to prevent mobocracy.
Let us stick with this mobile thief example. We desire an efficient police force and an efficient criminal justice system. No, not because we insist that wrongdoers get punished. Rather, so that we the people believe that wrongdoers get punished. With due care and attention paid too -- the mentally disturbed are going to gain the treatment they need after that due care and attention. This simply venal gets jailed.
But why is it that we want this? Again, I insist that it's not -- or at least not just -- that all must gain their just deserts. It's so that the mob does not take action because the state does not.
This is indeed a somewhat reductionist -- making it too, too, simple -- and even cynical view. But the reason for a police force, courts and prisons, is so that 50 people don't beat a phone robber near to death.
This is then true of the factory owner who decides that taking a slice of the wages is just too tempting. The reason we want a system where the workers can complain, the workers' complaints are heard and acted upon, is not so that the evil factory owner gets punished. It's so that there's a system of dealing with greedy factory owners exercising their power that does not involve burning the factory down.
The reason for a police force, courts and prisons, is so that 50 people don't beat a phone robber near to death
There have indeed been times and places where that was the only action that would produce the necessary reaction. Mob violence. One of the aims of civilization -- of effective government -- is to produce a system that solves such problems with less violence and, frankly, less mess.
We should go further too. Yes democracy is a good thing in and of itself -- we get to decide who our rulers are. To an extent, even how they rule. But the truly important thing about the system is that we get to throw them out. And we get to do so peacefully, on a regular timescale and without students having to die while we do so.
We've just been through that, as we all know. Democracy is the way of changing who is in power without the mob, without mobocracy. There's a reason Sheikh Hasina's retirement is happening in a Lutyens villa in Delhi, not a beachside one in Cox's Bazaar. It's that we had an inefficient -- to put it mildly -- method of democracy. One that did not allow that peaceful transference of power. Just as a belief that the police and courts aren't sufficiently efficient led to that lad getting beaten up over the mobile phone.
It's wholly true that the government can do many good and nice things for us. But one of the most basic that it must do is be efficient at certain basic tasks. The most important of these is that governmental systems replace that mob, the armed and angry populace, as a way of making necessary things happen.
None of us greatly enjoyed recent events even as many will agree they were necessary. That first job of government is to make sure that we've not got to do it that way again -- whether it's controlling petty crime or the grand larceny of government.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.