The Netherlands: An Extreme in “Less Government”?

Those who long for less government, less government “interference,” and more privatization may want to take a look at The Netherlands.

In an article in the Dutch NRC Handelsblad that starts with the assertion that “Nobody is in charge in the Netherlands – even democracy has been privatized,” Marc Chavannes, a Dutch journalist and political columnist, tells us:

The Netherlands was late in professing its devotion to Reaganism and Thatcherism. But when it finally did embrace the free market business model in the nineties, it never let go. Public transportation, energy supply, public housing, culture, health care, the way the legal system and education are managed, even the state itself – everything had to be given over to market principles. No public service remained untouched in this giant governance experiment while, at the same time, the quality of education was eroded by endless innovations and cuts.

Chavannes laments that the current Dutch government cannot make a single important decision, that it has rather chosen “to outsource its problems to twenty advisory committees of civil servants, which have been asked to report back by next summer,“ that it has evolved into a system of “endless compromise-building” by many special committees, and that even when a decision is made, a contract signed or a law passed, such only becomes a “welcome invitation to start the discussion anew.”

Even worse, for the past 10 to 15 years, government has asserted that many a public task could best be left to the free market. In a nutshell: the government lost its faith in government as a place to solve public problems and perform formerly public tasks. No public service remained untouched.

According to Chavannes, even the responsibility for all the outsourced services has been turned over to a newly-created cottage industry of supervisors:

Politicians are no longer at the wheel, which leaves some indifferent and others confounded by their lack of authority. The market supremacy in public administration – literally and mentally – has led to a privatisation of politics. The distinction between public and private duties has been deliberately blurred and it is an impossible task to try and find out who can be held accountable for what.

The problem is that—even in this “privatized government”— so many people in the Netherlands still rely on the state to help them out when they become sick or unemployed , and for disaster assistance and police protection.

By “ducking out” of their responsibilities, a “democratic deficit” has developed where the old political parties “have been reduced to spectators in a plot that they themselves have drafted but can no longer control,” and where “the state can no longer guarantee everybody’s wellbeing, nor can it stop dangers at the border.” “Confidence in the competence and reliability of the government and democratic politics has collapsed. Parliament, having focused on the details of execution rather than on legislation and oversight, has suffered the same credibility drain.”

But, there is hope:

Our national democracy, however, is the sole responsibility of the sixteen million Dutch. It can be fixed. If only they can agree, again, on what’s public and what’s not, on who is responsible and who is accountable.

To read the entire interesting article, please click here.