851216-2574 / USD 20.00 ACTA JURIDICA HUNGARICA © 2009 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 50, No 4, pp. 359–387 (2009) DOI: 10.1556/AJur.50.2009.4.2 GYÖRGY GAJDUSCHEK  The Critique of the Ideology Underlying the Slogan “Run like a business”  Abstract. The paper criticizes the ideology behind New Public Management movement that prefers market to government, private company to public institutions. The study sums up the main arguments of this ideology, based mostly on an overly simplified version of neoclassical economics and attempts to provide a structured inventory of counter arguments. Counter arguments first attack the myth of the general superiority of the market and the firm. Secondly, it is argued that government is different. Thus, even if market and firm were superior these mechanisms still cannot be applied in most parts of government business. Keywords: Public Administration, government, ideology, New Public Management, effciency, effectiveness, market, economic theory, public choice theory Introduction: The Subject-Matter and the Method In this essay I intend to analyse the ideology underlying the slogan “Run like a business” admittedly with a critical sting. Anyone who has dealt with the issues of the state and public administration even if in an oscular manner during the recent two decades, has hardly been able to evade the encounter with the slogan above or the underlying movement of the so-called New Public Management. The essence of the New Public Management generally abbreviated as NPM is that the classical-bureaucratic method of the functioning of the state should be abandoned. 1 Instead, the market mechanism and private companies constitute  PhD, Associate Professor, Senior research fellow, Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, H-1014 Budapest, Országház u. 30. E-mail: gajduschek@gmail.com  This paper was written within the framework of the project N o NKFPG-00075/2005 on “The effects of European Union’s membership on Hungarian law and administration”. The paper was originally written in Hungarian for the Politikatudományi Szemle (Hungarian Political Science Quarterly). 1 A detailed introduction of NPM is not feasible here. For further orientation: Hughes (2003) provides a typical practical summary of the application possibilities of New Public Management; whereas Perry [Perry, J. L. (ed.): Handbook of Public Administration, San