Going Without Government
Did you know that Belgium has gone a year without government?
Daniel Hannan had a few things to say about this piece of news, which I am guessing few people know about.
Daniel Hannan
Belgium has now gone for more than a year without a government and, you know what? Life is carrying on as normal. The crops are growing, the wheels are
turning in the factories, the civil servants (there are lots of these) are lingering over their coffee and speculoos biscuits. The light legislative agenda has given the country something of a boost: growth forecasts keep being upwardly revised, and the economy is expected to expand by 2.3 per cent this year.
I have previously tried to explain the deadlock, which centres on the reluctance of the Francophone parties to accept the verdict of last year’s general election. With every day that passes, the autonomist party, the N-VA, rises in the polls, leaving the other Flemish parties in the awkward position of propping up an illegitimate and defeated ministry. In a new election, Flemish voters would almost certainly repeat themselves, only more emphatically. Sooner or later, public policy will have to reflect public opinion.
What interests me here, though, is not Belgium’s constitutional dispensation, but the benign effects of having no government. In the absence of a coalition
agreement, the previous ministers have remained in their posts, but there is no parliamentary majority, nor any agreed programme. In consequence, Belgian MPs find themselves in the happy position of being able to vote as they please, issue by issue. With no new quangos being created, no new taxes being levied, few new regulations being imposed, the economy is growing faster than the state.
This is not to say that the present situation is infinitely sustainable. Belgium remains over-regulated, with some of the highest employment costs in the world. As the debt cancer mestastasizes across the eurozone, reform is becoming urgent, and no such reform is possible without a new administration. The parliamentary impasse locks in a great many costs. Yet, critically, it does not add to them. And this ought to hearten free marketeers.
We sometimes talk as if, left to itself, the state will grow. And, in some senses, it will: bureaucracies will always seek to extend their competences beyond whatever was was originally laid down. At the same time, though, regulations that are not replaced become redundant over time. Who cares, these days,about directives on steam ships or telegraphs or analogue telephones? Governments are forever seeking to catch up with new technologies – witness the current attempts to regulate the Internet. Simply by passing no new laws, we allow the private sector to outpace the public. The state is eventually left like some ruined Mayan temple, its slabs broken by roots, its columns snarled by creepers, its outlines swallowed up by the jungle.
