Martin Henry

What are the primary responsibilities of Government? In his New Year's message our Prime Minister has invited us to join the Government in making a fresh start, "but we can't start afresh to do the same things in the same old way. Change must come ..."

The non-negotiable duties of Government has been one of the fundamental issues of political economy for ages. While the introduction of the Prime Minister's New Year's message may make for excellent public relations, a matter of great importance in competitive politics, leading as it does with the staging of Cricket World Cup and continuing with the performance of our athletes and the Sunshine Girls mixed in with new hotels and the EPA with Europe, it sends very mixed signals about his understanding of the core business of Government.

In the long tradition of circus and bread in lieu of performance on critical core functions, the Government of Jamaica has regularly offered achievement in sports and entertainment and the economic activity of the private sector as its leading index of having accomplished something. And, of course, the people, who have long forgotten what the real business of government is if they ever knew, have been willing to buy this.

In a nutshell, the core business of the Government of the State is to perform those functions which individual citizens or the associations which they form freely are unable to carry out in their own capacity or the general public interest might not best be served were independent citizens to undertake those functions. And there are not a great many of these 'core functions'.

There is hardly any dispute that the most basic function of the Government of the State is to provide security and to maintain law and order so that citizens can pursue their self-interests in freedom and peace without injury to each others' persons, property or interests. On this score, successive political administrations, all duly elected democratically, have fallen seriously short.

High crime rate a problem

"The greatest problem we faced in 2007, as we did the year before and for years before that," the leader of Government concedes in his New Year's message, "was the high crime rate - the violence and the killings that have made so many of our people frightened, scared and angry." Angry with whom?

Much of that crime and violence, as Mr. Golding knows well, has its roots in the destructive competition for political power and in the failure of the Government to firmly discharge its primary duty. Beyond the direct impact of crime and violence, it has huge negative implications for the economy [the minding of which Governments almost everywhere have wrongly assumed as their main responsibility] and on every sector of society.

Adam Smith, that great 18th century political economist, observed in The Wealth of Nations that when the sovereign assumes the "duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of society", "he must always be exposed to numerous delusions" and "no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient" to that undertaking. We have subsequently seen the disastrous out-turns of the planned economy in the socialist state.

The sovereign, i.e. the Government, has only three fundamental responsibilities in Adam Smith's political economy: protection from external threats, administration of justice, and "erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain." The Prime Minister somewhat obliquely touched on two critical elements which fit into this simple schema for effective governance: the maintenance of public health and the defence of the currency, both of which our governments have fallen down on.

Governments have grown vast and complex everywhere, sucking off more and more of the GDP of states for public administration, which has become an end in itself. The clock can't be turned back. But Mr. Golding and his Government will find themselves immensely successful, and citizens immensely grateful, if the administration can properly attend to those three little matters that Adam Smith outlined way back in 1776 as the core functions of the sovereign. It will be remarkable how many good things will follow, as a matter of course, when we get those simple basics right.