Quotes from Peter Drucker’s The Sickness of Government

The late management guru Peter Drucker bewailed the public’s dependence on government from a practical standpoint in a chapter called the Sickness of Government in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity

Tip of the hat to Cato’s Chris Edwards. Mr. Edward’s blog post is the source of the following quotes which I cross checked with Mr. Drucker’s essay (bold mine)

Government surely has never been more prominent than today. The most despotic government of 1900 would not have dared probe into the private affairs of its citizens as income tax collectors now do routinely in the freest society. Even the tsar’s secret police did not go in for the security investigations we now take for granted.” p.3

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For seventy years or so – from the 1890’s to the 1960’s – mankind, especially in the developed countries, was hypnotized by government. We were in love with it and saw no limits to its abilities, or to its good intentions. p.4

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This belief has been, in effect, only one facet of a much more general illusion from which the educated and the intellectuals in particular have suffered: that by turning tasks over to government, conflict and decision would be made to go away. Once the “wicked private interests” had been eliminated, a decision as to the right course of action would be rational and automatic. There would be neither selfishness nor political passion. Belief in government was thus largely a romantic escape from politics and from responsibility.” p.5

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The greatest factor in the disenchantment with government is that government has not performed. The record over these last thirty or forty years has been dismal. Government has proven itself capable of doing only two things with great effectiveness. It can wage war. And it can inflate the currency.” p.7 (I would add spending and borrowing too—benson)

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The best we get from government in the welfare state is competent mediocrity. More often we do not even get that; we get incompetence such as we would not tolerate in an insurance company. In every country, there are big areas of government administration where there is no performance whatever – only costs. p.7

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Modern government has become ungovernable. There is no government today that can still claim control of its bureaucracy and of its various agencies. Government agencies are all becoming autonomous, ends in themselves, and directed by their own desire for power, their own narrow vision rather than by national policy. p.8

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We are very good at creating administrative agencies. But no sooner are they called into being than they become ends in themselves, acquire their own constituency as well as a “vested right” to grants from the treasury, continuing support by the taxpayer, and immunity to political direction. No sooner, in other words, are they born than they defy public will and public policy. p.9

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Nothing in history, for instance, can compare in futility with those prize activities of the American government, its welfare policies and its farm policies. Both policies are largely responsible for the disease that they are supposed to cure. p.13