Opinion: Harmful attempts to plan and regulate the global economy

Recently, a G20 summit of finance ministers was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The main concern of the summiteers was not the condition of the global economy, but two other issues: taxing the digital economy and taming digital and cryptocurrencies with overarching global regulations.

In a famous and, unfortunately, still pertinent quip, late United States President Ronald Reagan described the underlying problem this way: “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Governments’ excessive spending and oversized bureaucracies have created staggering public deficits. The unduly elevated role of public administration sucks talent away from the productive sectors of manufacturing and services into deadweight bureaucratic overhead. Lately, one can hardly avoid the impression that many regulations serve to justify public jobs rather than aid society. This amounts to a massive burden on the economy, especially in Europe, vastly contributing to the declining competitiveness on the continent.

How systems degenerate

Public administration should be a service organization for the citizen. Any good service organization should be lean, efficient and cost-effective. Taxes should be fair compensation for the services rendered, not a system for feeding an increasingly greedy administration and its redistribution schemes. In fact, social redistribution has degenerated to a tool used to satisfy the clientele of political parties …

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Harmful attempts to plan and regulate the global economy

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