Brivael Le Pogram explains that acceptance of mediocrity is key to the decline of most western societies … meek acceptance that we are lesser people living in the ruins of a just-passed but rapidly receding Golden Age:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m on a “air-conditioned” train where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.
And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.
The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.
The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops.
Make a list of everything the state touches:
Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.
Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.
Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding.
Justice: years for a judgment.
Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.
Colossal budgets.
Record-high tax takes in Europe.
Result: everything’s rotten.Why?
Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.
Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.
Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment”.
That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well. Milton Friedman summed it up in one sentence: it’s the worst of the four ways to spend money.
The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.
If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.
So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one. That’s the problem.
The information will eventually spread. And one day, collectively, we’ll stop swallowing it.
The problem is the state. Always.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
Update, 15 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
That’s why a severely limited government is the only winning move.
There’s a reason America was so economically dominant for a century.
It took President Linden Johnson’s “Great Society “ and Nixon’s adding government agencie and severing us from the gold standard to slow us down.
And then 50 years of anti-American propaganda taught in US schools to cripple us to the sad point we see today.
Minarchy is the answer!
Comment by Armageddon Rex — July 15, 2026 @ 02:03
Life advice —
1. Don’t put stupid, batshit crazy people in charge of your life.
2. Don’t bargain away your God-given rights in exchange for some illusory free stuff.
Comment by stan — July 15, 2026 @ 08:36
This rule breaks down in the private sector under monopoly conditions. See Microsoft (OK it is a duopoly).
Comment by Richard — July 15, 2026 @ 09:57
I once had a layover in Houston for a trip from Minneapolis to Orlando. We were ninth in line for takeoff, but had to wait for an hour, unmoving. Why? Because the plane first in line for takeoff had a weather hold for its destination: LA. Instead of having that plane roll done the runway (no taxiway on the other side), and then get off the runway and get in line behind the other planes, ATC – which of course, is the government, just made everyone wait until that plane could go. There were a lot more than 9 planes waiting by the time we took off. But, as the article says, ATC doesn’t have to worry about customer satisfaction.
Comment by yeah — July 15, 2026 @ 10:15