Governments Win First Prize in Environmental Hypocrisy Contest!

If you really want to be environmentally friendly, you use the fewest possible resources to do whatever it is you need to do. Consumers and businesses do this by necessity. Governments don't.

Consumers have income constraints on what they can spend to run their households. This makes them spend wisely and minimize waste.

Similarly, businesses in competitive markets have to be efficient in how they use resources in order to keep their prices low and thereby keep customers from switching to competitors. If they don't, their sales fall and they face the possibility of going out of business (unless of course they can convince governments to spend taxpayers' money to keep them afloat).

Governments are a very different creature. They have little incentive to operate efficiently. Indeed, in the massive government bureaucracies, the primary motivation of senior managers is to expand their empires and thus increase their status and pay.

Elected officials, in nominal overall charge, know little of what is going on in the bureaucracies and are not around long enough to find out. Moreover, their ambition is more focused on unveiling new programs to win voter recognition rather than on making the bureaucracy run efficiently.

The waste in government operations is well documented in the reports of auditor generals. It is also evident in the salaries and benefits paid to government employees, which are much higher than those in the private sector for employees of the same skill level (see Note below). Further, it takes more employees to do a given amount of work when the work is done inside of government compared to what is required if the work is done in the private sector.

In short, governments by their nature are hostile to the environment.

So the next time you see, read or hear an expensive advertising campaign from your government telling you to use less of (fill in the blank here: electricity, plastic bags, water, land, etc.), get angry. Get very angry. Tell the people that are supposed to be working for you that they are hypocrites. They have a long way to go before they will use resources as efficiently as you do.

Better yet, tell them to let the private sector do whatever is they do that really needs doing, and then stop doing the rest. The environment and taxpayers will be better off.



Note: In December 2008, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) published a comprehensive analysis of salaries in the public sector compared to those in the private sector. http://www.cfib.ca/research/reports/rr3077.pdf Overall compensation in the public sector was found to be 30% higher than in the private sector, leading to the conclusion:

"Expressed in dollar terms, public sector
employers have a combined wage and benefits bill that is $19 billion higher
than if they had kept costs to private sector norms."

That is one heck of an unnecessary cost to the environment, not to mention taxpayers.