Which should provoke the greater concern: corporations avoiding taxes or government projects wasting taxpayer money? Theodore Dalrymple has a clear answer in a new post at The Social Affairs Unit.

I might as well say straight out what I believe, though cannot prove: that the cost overruns and failures to function are, in fact, vital to the main purpose of the government IT projects, and not some unfortunate side effect such as dizziness that you get from taking an otherwise life-saving drug.

The failures to work and cost overruns are by now so regular, so predictable and so constant that they cannot be ascribed to mere error. They are indispensable to the corporatist state that Britain has become, and that goes some way to explain our failure in the world.

Read the post here