The showrunner for Yes, Minister was an adherent to public choice theory, which basically argues that the government can't do anything to improve people's lives because bureaucrats only look out for their own interests and are not responsive to constituents. The response to this observation by proponents of public choice theory is to promote the private sector, which they believe to be responsive to the people through market signals. The politics of Yes, Minister and the Thatcher government were responses to this observation and are driven by similar ideological impulses. Public choice theory is the theoretical basis of austerity. It's unfortunate that an ideology with such pernicious consequences is basically correct at least when it comes to the national security state.
Privatization of the state is just one of the many bad solutions you get when you mix "there is no alternative" with bourgeois democracy. I think the whole framing of Yes, Minister, being that politicians and career bureaucrats have a self-interest divorced from the general public, along with the notion that politicians are often kind of bewildered dumbasses who are guided by convenience, is basically correct, but that is just the reality of bourgeois democracy. The problem average people tend to have is that their political imaginations are still constrained by the symbols of the system that exists, so to them "democracy" may as well be roughly equivalent to what we have, if not amenable to some changes. The consequence is that people become politically misanthropic, blaming the sorry state of the country on other average people who are too stupid or vile to vote correctly. But further than that many people begin to feel that, since this is basically what "democracy" is, that government must be fatally flawed in that you can't really trust politicians to not lie to you and cheat you once they get into office for their own benefit. So you come back to neoliberalism/reaganism/thatcherism etc. as an out, because for better or worse it appears that you can't trust the government to actually help you. But of course privatization is no solution, because the market itself is made up of shadowy unaccountable figures out for their self-interest, and their self-interest has no innate moral compass either. More often than not when average people vote for somebody who is shouting about how politicians suck and they want to just leave you alone or whatever, they're voting on the premise that they agree that they don't like politicians much, rather than specifically wanting all the roads to become toll roads. As long as people's ideology is constrained by the state of things now, they'll find themselves confused by (or resigned to) their entrapment in getting toyed with by institutions much bigger than themselves with many motivations to abuse, pilfer and disregard them.
The showrunner for Yes, Minister was an adherent to public choice theory, which basically argues that the government can't do anything to improve people's lives because bureaucrats only look out for their own interests and are not responsive to constituents. The response to this observation by proponents of public choice theory is to promote the private sector, which they believe to be responsive to the people through market signals. The politics of Yes, Minister and the Thatcher government were responses to this observation and are driven by similar ideological impulses. Public choice theory is the theoretical basis of austerity. It's unfortunate that an ideology with such pernicious consequences is basically correct at least when it comes to the national security state.
Privatization of the state is just one of the many bad solutions you get when you mix "there is no alternative" with bourgeois democracy. I think the whole framing of Yes, Minister, being that politicians and career bureaucrats have a self-interest divorced from the general public, along with the notion that politicians are often kind of bewildered dumbasses who are guided by convenience, is basically correct, but that is just the reality of bourgeois democracy. The problem average people tend to have is that their political imaginations are still constrained by the symbols of the system that exists, so to them "democracy" may as well be roughly equivalent to what we have, if not amenable to some changes. The consequence is that people become politically misanthropic, blaming the sorry state of the country on other average people who are too stupid or vile to vote correctly. But further than that many people begin to feel that, since this is basically what "democracy" is, that government must be fatally flawed in that you can't really trust politicians to not lie to you and cheat you once they get into office for their own benefit. So you come back to neoliberalism/reaganism/thatcherism etc. as an out, because for better or worse it appears that you can't trust the government to actually help you. But of course privatization is no solution, because the market itself is made up of shadowy unaccountable figures out for their self-interest, and their self-interest has no innate moral compass either. More often than not when average people vote for somebody who is shouting about how politicians suck and they want to just leave you alone or whatever, they're voting on the premise that they agree that they don't like politicians much, rather than specifically wanting all the roads to become toll roads. As long as people's ideology is constrained by the state of things now, they'll find themselves confused by (or resigned to) their entrapment in getting toyed with by institutions much bigger than themselves with many motivations to abuse, pilfer and disregard them.