How Much Government Does Our Money Buy?

On German building sites, a quiet miracle of multiplication sometimes takes place. Before the first stone is laid, files have grown, assessments have been commissioned and approvals documented. Every step has a reason; every note guards against an error. No one acts foolishly. Yet rational individual actions can give rise to a structure whose most accomplished feature is the administration of its own possibility. Perhaps Germany’s problem with the state is not that it does too much. Perhaps it does ever more before anything can be done at all.

For a state can be too large and too small at the same time. Large in regulating, running and registering; small in .fixing, forming and forcing. On paper, it grows; in reality, its presence shrinks. This is precisely where the public spending ratio misses the point. It measures how much money passes through public hands. It does not measure how much state emerges at the other end. Billions can be moved without completing a bridge; responsibilities multiplied without creating accountability. Germany may be suffering from too much public spending and too little state capacity.

A crumbling bridge needs replacing. Yet between assessment and construction come financing, permits and procurement; these safeguard public funds, competition and safety. The problem begins when safeguarding construction consumes more state capacity than construction itself.

It is the hallmark of a system that replaces responsibility with procedure: expert reports and committees, consultations and briefings, audit notes and documentation each have a rationale of their own. Taken together, however, they acquire a second function: what matters is not making the right decision, but knowing that one will not bear the blame for a wrong one alone. Bureaucracy becomes institutional liability insurance. The decision is wrapped in layers of jurisdiction until its authorship is smothered beyond recognition.

Outcomes are unruly. Whether a building stands, a bridge holds or a political decision works becomes clear only later. Procedure delivers success at once: consultation has taken place, stakeholders have been involved, checks performed and bargains struck. Procedures are obedient. So “What has been achieved?” gives way to the more comfortable question: “Was the process followed?” The measurable triumphs over the important.

Overregulation is not necessarily a monument to boundless faith in the state. It can be its tombstone. Where discretion is distrusted, rules emerge; where the commissioning authority is distrusted, oversight; where scandal looms, another review. The regulatory state becomes an archive of institutional distrust of its own population. Every abuse leaves behind a rule, every failed project a procedural check, every flawed contract award a documentation requirement. Errors accumulate in layers. Those layers are rarely cleared away. The bureaucratic state can learn, but it cannot forget.

The citizen pays not only for the school or the road, the museum or the bridge. Increasingly, he pays for organising the organisation of their delivery: reviewing the plans, checking the review, documenting the checks, reviewing the documentation. The public spending ratio can rise while tangible results diminish. A question of distribution becomes a question of the state’s capacity to bear fruit: after all the layers of institutional self-protection, what remains of public money — apart from the record of its passage?

The greatest luxury of a functioning state is simplicity: rule, authority, decision. Only the sentence is simple; its prerequisite has grown more burdensome than any form: responsibility. The less anyone is willing to bear, the more signatures are required. No design becomes masterful through the sheer number of its elements. Quality emerges where complexity is mastered through the composition of simple parts. Institutions obey the same law. Disorder does not become more intelligent by forming committees.

Between decision and reality, an intermediate realm has grown: tough scar tissue of review, safeguards and reporting that thickens around the body of the state after every past injury. This intermediary state feeds on the work without producing any of its own. Each new safeguard may be reasonable in itself; layer upon layer, it wraps itself around action until the body, protected against every wound, can no longer move.

For power does not grow indefinitely with control. If every decision must pass through twenty safeguards, responsibility is spread so thin that no one retains enough of it to decide. A state can lose its power by seeking to control everything. State strength lies not in the scope for countless interventions, but in the capacity to execute a few legitimate decisions. Form without function is decoration. Procedure without execution is the theatre of power.

Germany may need not less state, but less of the scar tissue that has formed between resolve and action: fewer miracles of multiplying files and less concentrated irresponsibility — and more state where state capacity must prove itself: in taking responsibility and carrying decisions through. Whether forty, fifty or sixty per cent of economic output drains through public hands tells us little about this. For the citizen, state capacity proves itself when the road is passable, the permit granted and the judgement enforced. What matters is how much of the state’s strength reaches the citizen. A state that seeks to avoid every wound binds its strength within its own scar tissue.