The myth “Bulgaria will get better when politicians start listening to the people”. Part Three: More examples and conclusions

V. Privatization and concession of state and municipal property:

This last article brings together several subtopics. What they have in common is that they are talking about systems that are an example of inefficiency and are on the verge of collapse, but there can be no question of taking radical measures to solve the problems, since “the People” prefers “the State to take care of it” and does not give a word about providing specific services to the free market and “evil capitalists”.

1) Healthcare: “ The people” believe that it is the job of the State and that it should provide more and more money for healthcare. If asked what would happen if it were left to the free market, they would answer that people would be left to die on the streets, and healthcare should be accessible to all. Politicians, of course, listen to them and over the last decade they have more than doubled the budget of the National Health Insurance Fund. However, what are the real results? People receive poor service, have to pay extra under the table, and many die due to the shortage of ambulances, consumables and qualified personnel. This, by the way, is not only a problem of healthcare in Bulgaria. Even in Sweden, which in the minds of the “people” is a benchmark for a welfare state, more and more people are switching to private healthcare because they cannot stand the wait of several months in the state one. After all, a doctor or a medical team can only be in one place at a time and cannot serve 100 people at once, especially when it comes to more complex interventions. By violating market principles, the state de facto creates excess demand, which cannot be satisfied with the available potential. And vice versa – where, for example, ambulances are private (for example, on the Black Sea coast), no one dies on the street because they have been waiting for an hour.

2) Education: The situation here is similar to that in healthcare – state intervention has brought the system to collapse, but there is no talk of radical reforms, and for “Narodna” the solution is to pour more money into the void. Whether 4, 6 or 8% of GDP will be given to the current system is completely irrelevant, if the incentives for those participating in it are still the same and if state officials continue to have the power to standardize and standardize children with different talents and needs. The results are quite eloquent – nearly 40% of students are functionally illiterate. Even universities are churning out graduates who then have to be retrained by business when they start a career or do not even make it to a career in their specialty, but instead do something sideline that they did not waste 5 years studying for. De facto, the role of secondary education at the moment is to produce rakija nationalists who can then more easily cast their votes in support of populist policies and political formations that rely only on patriotic pathos, while the role of higher education is to cover up and postpone the problem of youth unemployment, as well as to ensure Bulgaria's top spot in the ranking for the country with the most taxi drivers - graduates.

It is extremely important to note that the history of Bulgaria is full of examples that show that education can develop without state intervention. During the Bulgarian Renaissance, schools arose not because the Sultan taxed people and then invested in education, but because Bulgarians, even in small settlements, organized themselves, collected money from each other as much as they could and then built schools. Parents controlled the educational process, there was no central planning and state standards, and the material was tailored to the needs of the students. Also, the brothers Evlogi and Hristo Georgiev, with whose money the Sofia University “Kliment Ohridski” was built, were not popular politicians, but Bulgarian entrepreneurs who made a donation worth 6 million gold leva.

We can compare the above with education during socialism and the myth that it was at the highest level during that period. How is it measured and who says that the level is high, when firstly there is no market for the education service and the consumer (parents and students) has no control to determine what is quality and what is not and, secondly, there is no labor market in which to assess whether the acquired knowledge and qualifications are useful or were just a waste of time?

3 ) BDZ: BDZ is the collective image of all the enterprises that have managed to remain state-owned so far. Poor conditions on the trains, constant incidents such as fires and derailments, huge state subsidies and losses that many times exceed revenues. [1] But as soon as there is talk of privatizing the enterprise, "The People" starts to protest, to lie down on the tracks and good politicians listen and leave the reforms for the next government. And the debts pile up and if it were not for the constant subsidies from the State, bankruptcy would be increasingly inevitable. [2] It is typical for most state-owned companies that were not privatized in the last 5 years that the moment is missed when they are in relatively decent financial health and there would be more serious interest in them, the situation is waited for to worsen and only when the knife is pressed to the bone is there any chance of taking measures. In the near future, both BDZ, VMZ "Sopot", and the water supply companies, which are still in state and municipal hands, as well as the District Heating Companies, will have to be "gifted" for one lev to some investor, but the likelihood that this one lev will be given by him is decreasing - rather, he will have to be given money to incur all the headaches associated with the specific company. And if he still decides to take the risk, he will have to make layoffs, raise prices and invest millions to compensate for all the years lost by state management.

VI. Extracts

What are the conclusions that can be drawn from everything written so far? It is obvious that when politicians listen to the “People”, and the “People” are economically illiterate, the results will be the complete opposite of the declared good intentions. However, this does not mean that politicians should not listen to the “People”, do whatever they want and even establish the dictatorship that some propagandists dream of. Why is this so – because in the end, the “People” are the ones who elect politicians, and when the dominant ideas among them are populist and counter-productive, then only populist politicians with a relatively left-wing bias, whose reasoning horizon is no longer than 4 years, can come to power. Accordingly, whatever nonsense they create today, if its effects are most severe in 6 years, then this is not their problem, because most likely someone else will have to deal with it. Also, dictatorship is an option that cannot work, because, as the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek noted in "The Road to Serfdom", a dictatorship manages to establish the most unscrupulous, but also the least capable individuals in a society. It is extremely unrealistic to expect that Bulgaria can produce a capable dictator, given that even through democratic means it has failed to produce an economically literate politician in power (reference - the last 4 governments).

In fact, the correct answer to the problems is a little different, namely that it is best for politicians to stop interfering in the economy. The same goes for the “People”. It is high time for the “People” to start respecting the property of others, to work more and to interfere in the affairs of others less. In order to “fix” Bulgaria, the key words are liberalization, deregulation, privatization, freedom, private property and also patience. These are the conditions under which, on the one hand, people will have the motivation to develop and work more and better, on the other hand, they will pay for things that they really think they need, and not because they were forced by another person through the state apparatus, and on the third, they will have the opportunity to truly be in solidarity with others, helping them voluntarily and making donations.

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