The following idea must, I think remain forever in the realm of thought experiment.
Why don’t we start sending out invoices to each individual or family, itemising the cost of all the public services from which they have personally benefited in the preceding year – for information & for the record only, of course.
The bill for the children’s school & for all the doctor’s appointments, prescriptions & treatments should be relatively straightforward. But what about emptying the bins? Not to mention the thorny problem of the police: do the criminals or the victims pay, or should the entire cost be born by those who have clearly benefited the most because the police efforts have ensured that they encountered no problems with crime at all.
It’s not exactly a new idea - the Labour government tried emphasising the ‘Social Wage’ in the 1970s as a way of trying to stifle both demands for wages to keep pace with inflation & with protests from those who, because of these wage rises, were being dragged into the net of income tax.
Actually even the supposedly straightforward ones would not be at all simple. There would be privacy issues, & plenty of weird anomalies, seeming howlers or bureaucratic blunders for the press to have fun with.
But pondering the issue doesn’t half make you aware of the difference between cost and price, one of the important differences between doing business as a public rather than a private provider.
Modern supermarkets & chain stores have exposed the extent to which the setting of prices is as much an art as a science.
The cost of producing a 5-pack of Snickers bars probably varies constantly over time, depending on the price of raw materials, the health or morale of the workers, machine breakdowns … while the price at the supermarket varies in a way which is not explained by any plausible scenario for the variation in costs. The sales data will however provide useful feedback on the long tern viability of their pricing strategies & the balance between the need to control costs & quality.
A public sector provider would probably calculate the average over a period of time & then apply that price for the next period, unvarying, no matter what the circumstances. Costs & quality would be varied, if at all, in response more to political pressures rather than exigencies of the market
