For a New Liberty The Libertarian Manifesto_3

The Public Sector, I: Government in Business
But this sort of attitude toward the consumer is not confined
to traffic on the streets. New York City, for example, has
suffered periodically from a water “shortage.” Here is a situation
where, for many years, the city government has had a
compulsory monopoly of the supply of water to its citizens.
Failing to supply enough water, and failing to price that water
in such a way as to clear the market, to equate supply and
demand (which private enterprise does automatically), New
York’s response to water shortages has always been to blame
not itself, but the consumer, whose sin has been to use “too
much” water. The city administration could only react by outlawing
the sprinkling of lawns, restricting use of water, and
demanding that people drink less water. In this way, government
transfers its own failings to the scapegoat user, who is
threatened and bludgeoned instead of being served well and
efficiently.
There has been similar response by government to the
ever-accelerating crime problem in New York City. Instead of
providing efficient police protection, the city’s reaction has
been to force the innocent citizen to stay out of crime-prone
areas. Thus, after Central Park in Manhattan became a notorious
center for muggings and other crime in the night hours,
New York City’s “solution” to the problem was to impose a
curfew, banning use of the park in those hours. In short, if an
innocent citizen wants to stay in Central Park at night, it is he
who is arrested for disobeying the curfew; it is, of course, easier
to arrest him than to rid the park of crime.
In short, while the long-held motto of private enterprise is
that “the customer is always right,” the implicit maxim of
government operation is that the customer is always to be
blamed.
Of course, the political bureaucrats have a standard
response to the mounting complaints of poor and inefficient
service: “The taxpayers must give us more money!” It is not
enough that the “public sector,” and its corollary in taxation,
has been growing far more rapidly in this century than the
national income. It is not enough that the flaws and headaches
of government operation have multiplied along with the
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