A state is its infrastructure. Once the infrastructure goes down, the state is not failed. It’s simply no longer a state. The product of a health service is not fiscal efficiency. It is healthcare. The product of any item of infrastructure, from a railway to a water authority, is not fiscal efficiency. The efficient production and distribution of its product is its product. A state is not its ability to earn and “save” money which it will pass on as tax cuts to people who are already secure, comfortable and well-serviced. A state is not a corporation, serving its shareholders. The big linguistic con the UK has swallowed at every level since the Thatcherite takeover of the state is the shift in meaning whereby the efficiency of an operation is always and only defined as its fiscal efficiency. This central and obsessive platform of UK politics is a profit-taker’s view, obviously. But it’s also the first concern of an absurdly inflated senior management class, and as such the uninterrogated religion of middle and lower management. We have allowed management to make decisions that should be value-based–generalised goals and goods, choices about living made by a population–to such a degree that management has achieved the status of a value-system in itself. In discussion, managers are as po-faced about management and its basis in accountancy as the priesthood used to be about sin and redemption. When you question fiscal efficiency, you aren’t even questioning an ideology. You are committing blasphemy. Why do I even need to point this out.
What serendipity that I come across this, a stark outline of the problems with measurement of state-government as capitalistic infrastructure instead of human infrastructure, right after I finished reading about the non-monetary goals of infrastructure by DebChachra.