Government's not very competent - therefore it should do less

We’re just fine with this line of reasoning but we are surprised to see it in The Guardian, that home of the Panopticon state, all seeing and all knowing. For that is what would be required of government if the varied plans that newspaper proffer to us were possible to bring to fruition. We’d need to have a state which was able to know, in detail, what the problems were, their causes, and how to cure those ails.

Yet here we’ve a complaint that government can’t in fact do more than one thing at a time:

Brexit: not just a political shambles, but a disaster for all public policy

Richard Vize

Vital services in health, social care and local government are being neglected. It’s an unforgivable failure

No, the argument is not just that Tories don’t care therefore. It is instead that by concentrating upon Brexit there’s not enough government left over to look at these other things:

It’s a funny way to take back control: vital areas of public policy that directly affect our lives are being sacrificed to the obsession with Brexit, and there seems little chance of respite.

While Brexit sucks up all the political oxygen, major areas of public policy, including local government, health and social care, are drifting.

Note that it’s not even the competence of government to be able to do these things which is being called into question - something we’d question ourselves but so be it. It’s that government simply doesn’t have the attention span, the capacity, to even consider more than one thing at a time.

At which point we’d better to move to a system of government that only does concentrate on one thing at a time then, if that’s all it can do. Welcome to the minarchist state, courtesy of The Guardian, on the grounds that government just can’t handle more than the one problem at a time. Therefore only allow it to deal with one at a time.