Mercantilism with a Tie

The doctrine of New Public Management was eagerly adopted by the moderate-left Workers' Party in the early 1990's, supposedly as part of an attempt to make the public sector more cost-effective, more accountable to the public and to a greater extent able to provide high-quality services to a society in rapid change.

The prescribed solution was to run all public affairs the way a corporation would, making all the same exact mistakes while restructuring sector after sector according to corporate principles. Privatizing sectors with no actual market competition (which would even for demographic reasons alone often be nearly-impossible anyway) creates a de facto corporate cartel within the state, delivering lower-grade services more slowly, at greater financial and structural costs, accountable to the public as customers or not at all.

To counter this problem, NPM requires all sectors to document their activity in increasing detail, meaning more paper pushers than ever before are in the state's employ as “administrative employees”, undoubtedly creating many jobs, but strangling the organizational structure in its unwilingness to listen to its professional employees except through their unions (admittedly from a technocratic perspective an ingeniously integrated part of Norwegian infrastructure). Hospitals are no longer managed by doctors, for instance, but by economists. With such internal counter-incentives to performance it is a wonder anything gets done at all anymore. Also see the Gjørv Report.

The underlying cause, Corporatism, is of course much older, having replaced feudal government as early as the 16th century and since then proven flexible enough to dodge the gradual reforms of the ruling class as well as the sporadic revolutionary ire of us commoners. It has proven profitable enough to fuel a welfare state, vague enough for its implications not to be grasped in its fullness by the citizenry, expansive enough to seize power on every level. New Public Management is just the current version, arguably with less violence, but by the same logic and with the same long-term results.