Results: Some of the most educated citizens are employed by governments to design economic policy yet the results seem to ignore common sense. Governments use their advice to "manage" the economy and seem surprised when chaos results. Why let them?

In the mid 1970s I had a job that required me to hire staff. We had a scale of salaries and benefits that the business could afford to pay. Our biggest competitor for staff was the federal government who paid starting salaries that were higher than the market could bear and benefits that no company could match. The government also had its offices in prime real estate in the city centre. In order to hire staff we had to pay even higher wages and had to increase the price of our products to cover it. Should government be allowed to use tax revenue to gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace when this drives up the cost of goods and services?

Also in the mid 1970s, the government introduced a range of new social programs and increased taxes to pay for it. They also ran fiscal deficits and convinced citizens that this was just "citizens borrowing from citizens". The government was now competing with other borrowers which drove up interest rates. It also increased the money supply which increased inflation. Wages and prices increased dramatically so government introduced "wage and price controls" to manage the economy. What do you think happened?

Perhaps the worst example of government fiscal policy producing disastrous results that should have been predictable, was the elimination of Income Averaging Annuities in the early 1980s. IAAs were used by farmers, athletes and those in the arts communities who had what was called an "unusual income." This could be from peak earning years as an athlete, the sale of a piece of art by the artist, a farmer selling of a section of land, and anything else where the income and the tax on it would have been both atypical and significant. These IAAs spread the income and the tax on it over several years to "average out" the income. The media and some left wing economists persuaded the government that these IAAs were a tax loophole and they were eliminated almost overnight with no time given to make other arrangements. Here are some results of this sudden game changer. Which of them should have been predictable?

The population of Canada has been increasing. The government thought its immigration and refugee programs had increased the population by 500K when the reality was an increase of 1.5 million. The government had not factored in how the 500k were going to be housed and jobs found for them. To make the problem disappear, the government is housing refugee families in hotel rooms, apartment buildings, and social housing. They are paying the full market price for this using tax dollars, which has driven up the costs for everyone else (a double whammy). An extra million added to the mix is having a huge impact in the housing market. People on low incomes can't afford these high rents and are sleeping in their cars (or in homeless camps). Should this outcome not have been predicted?

Given that many or all of these outcomes were the logical result of ill considered government policies do you think government should hire fewer so called experts and more ordinary citizens with some common sense?