Well, yes, OK, emergency, pandemic, ventilators etc

The coronavirus did rather blindside civilisation and no one was going to get all reactions to it quite right:

UK spent £569m on 20,900 ventilators for Covid care but most remain unused

Government was right to prioritise speed over cost, says National Audit Office

Many of those made cost some 50% more than those bought in less stressful - or lower demand - times and that’s to be expected. Demand changes, prices do, this is how the universe works.

We can also muse on whether having 90% of those extra made remain unused is a good allocation of resources but clearly being blindsided by that reality out there excuses quite a lot of mistakes. As with military stores in 1946 - some of which were still being used by cadet forces 30 years later - an excess of stock following an emergency may be undesirable but it’s hardly a hanging offence. Actually, to our certain and personal knowledge, some CCFs were still using 1918 stock in the 1970s.

However, this evidence of the efficiency of political allocation should not be dismissed even as it is accepted as being just one of those things. If this is the outcome of using politicians and bureaucracies to order and direct the economy then we clearly need to minimise the use of politics and bureaucrats to order the economy.

That is, it’s the very performance in an emergency which insists that we only use the system in emergency. Given what and how they plan when they do planning is something for us to use as rarely as possible.

It is possible to argue that if only it had been other people being stampeded by groupthink then things would have been different but really, can we at least try to keep the debate within the bounds of possibility?