What is the role of government?

This has been bothering me for some time, and it relates to my previous posting of the "too difficult bucket". Obviously the role of government is to govern. Government is supposed to bring together a diverse range of resources and assets and deploy them to make large scale change happen in a way that individuals or small groups could not. Government has two main areas of responsibility, the first is execution; actually doing stuff, the other is policy making; dictating how others should do stuff. We seem to have a government that does not govern so much as fiddle. Tinkering with the small stuff, that is best left to smaller local groups, while ignoring the root causes of most of the important issues. A typical reaction we, the taxpayer, see now, is incessant increases in the price of something as a way of changing behaviour. Listening to commercial radio at the moment gives a really good indication of this. Current public service adverts tell us that we will be fined for, late payment of taxes, no TV license, no car tax, not putting up a no smoking notice in the office; the list goes on. This is not governing, this is mere fiddling.

One area that really annoys me are the suggestions for a new rubbish charge. We already pay to have our rubbish taken away. While this is not perfect, the basis of the charge being the arbitrary rateable value of the house rather than the individuals that throw the rubbish away, there are now government suggestions to add an extra charge to discourage rubbish production. Now you may be different, but looking around my house, I don't actually create much rubbish. I compost and recycle as much as I can but the majority of the stuff I put in the bins each week is sold to me by supermarkets as packaging and delivered by postmen as marketing and junk mail, neither of which I can influence. But a government could. It would be easy for government to dictate to supermarkets that they are expected to reduce packaging by a huge figure in a short amount of time otherwise they will be heavily and repeatedly taxed to cover the cost of disposing of the rubbish they supply. Surely this would be far more effective than adding yet another cost to the tax payer. The same goes for landfill, why are some areas running out of landfill space, while others are disposing of rubbish in furnaces that generate electricity? While we are on this subject, why fiddle with plastic bag charges? Why not legislate that only biodegradable bags can be supplied. Clearly there is a lack of government focus on the root causes.

Picture by: Ian Britton - FreeFoto.com

The current frenzy around adding the the cost of motoring also seems misplaced to me. Instead of a well thought out coordinated strategy with a predictable and agreed outcome we seem to have a mass of extra charges on both private and public transport, as well as a rumbling undercurrent of how it is unsocial to live in the country because of the need to use private cars to get around. Following this to its logical conclusion, people will be forced to live no further than cycling distance of their workplace or school as not only will we be priced off the roads but there will be no parallel investment in public transport or non-polluting alternatives. Big companies provide services and products that create profit by selling. What they sell is dictated by market pressure which is created partly by legislation and partly by consumer desire.  Rather than pricing cars off the road, which in the long run will only terminally damage the economy, work with the manufacturers to encourage the rapid development and adoption of any or all of the potential petrol replacements currently being touted, including electricity, fuel cells and hydrogen. Pricing the end user is just one lever that government can pull and while it is the easiest to implement it cannot result in sustainable long term change.

Government isn't supposed to be easy, it is supposed to do the difficult stuff that individuals and local groups would struggle to do. I am looking forward to seeing a government in place that has a broader vision and actually address the root causes of the problems rather than merely fiddling with the symptoms. I think I may be waiting a very long time for that to happen.