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Look what the Brits have done!

Article Excerpt
THEY MEANT WELL:

Government Project Disasters,

By D. R. Myddelton

242 pages; Institute of Economic Affairs, 2007

Those of us who favor limited Government argue that when the state gets involved in projects that can be done by private enterprise, the results are almost certain to be bad. We would be best off with a firm rule against such endeavors for two reasons: First, government officials are apt to undertake projects that should not be done at all. Second, even if they hit upon a potentially worthwhile venture, they will approach it in a very inefficient manner. Politicians and bureaucrats are not spending their own money and do not stand to lose if they are wrong. Therefore, resources will be wasted.

In They Meant Well, Cranfield University professor D. R. Myddelton examines six government project disasters in Great Britain. He employs his expertise in finance and accounting to good effect by digging into the political economy of several British boondoggles: the R.101 airship, the "groundnut scheme" in East Africa, British nuclear power, the Concorde, the Channel Tunnel, and the Millennium Dome. Both Conservative and Labour governments presided over those fiascos, and the results range from almost comical to utterly tragic. The common thread among them is that the politicians overestimated benefits, underestimated costs, did not know when to stop, and stuck the public with a big tab.

AIRSHIPS Myddelton begins with a story that today seems quaint--the British government's determination to have a fleet of airships providing passenger service to the far-flung outposts of the Empire. Blimps would quietly float people to India, Australia, Egypt, Canada, and other places.

The idea found favor with the Conservative government in 1922. When the Labour Party came to power the following year, it chose not to cancel the program, but to approve (and subsidize) both a private enterprise airship (the R.100) and an airship to be designed and built by the Air Ministry's Royal Airship Works (the R.101).

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Blimps were nothing new in the early 1920s, but they had never been used for long-distance travel. No...

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