# Government Waste vs Market Inefficiencies **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 6, 2010, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719 "2010-07-06T15:05:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/181 "2010-07-11T04:32:09Z")
> [@](#): > > OTOH, if the residents there are so convinced, they can collude to all use the same service, and then, problem solved, only one truck! In my area, we used to have dozens of trash companies and it caused all sorts of problems with traffic. So the country passed a law saying that residential trash bins had to be 40 gallons and within 2 years most neighborhoods were served by one or two trash companies. In fact companies started to standardize pickup days so that your trash is picked up Tuesdays and Fridays, no matter which company you use and recycling is on Thursdays. > [@](#): > > If you are buying raw salt of standardized quantity and quality on a market exchange, which you quite possibly need never take possession of before you can sell it, then you probably have a commodity on your hands. > > What you get at the supermarket, not so much. That is a finished product. OK so when you say commodity, you are talking about commodities as defined by the futures exchanges. I think people use the term commodity more colloquially than that. I think people (other than you) have been using the term commodity to mean substantially indifferentiable products or services. ---
**Author:** ![emacknight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@emacknight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/emacknight)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/182 "2010-07-11T04:44:52Z")
Oops, just realized we need to clarify another point: We are comparing 1 large company vs 5 small companies. We are NOT comparing 1 truck vs 5 trucks. Sorry if any of you were half way through your models. So from that, each company can use as many trucks as they want/need. But it should be noted, the 5 small companies will have to use at least 1. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Love](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e8c25b/32.png) [@Dr.Love](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Love)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/183 "2010-07-11T04:57:10Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Do any of the S1\_sub\_n mimic S2, a single provider going to assigned houses. Or do any of them mimic S1, a collection of 5 routes to what could be considered a random assignment of the entire set? I don’t understand what it means that “S1\_n mimics S2.” ---
**Author:** ![emacknight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@emacknight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/emacknight)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/184 "2010-07-11T05:06:06Z")
> [@not\_alice](#): > > Why they do it or how they are incented doesn’t matter. They do it in every competitive service, be it phones, wireless, ISP, tv, supermarket shopping, car buying, whatever. People have loyalty, but only so far. So sorry, you can claim the products are undifferentiated, and always will be, but then you would have to make the same for Verizon vs. ATT vs. Sprint vs … Sure there is a lot of overlap of service, but there is a lot of difference too. First, it never occurred to me that you might be a chic. Yup, you pointed to quite a few services that are undifferentiated. It requires a tremendous amount of marketing to make us think ATT has more coverage, or is it Verizon. I know it’s the one with the blue map, or was that the Democrats. Which one has the iPhone? I know Republicans have the droids, or was it the clones. Also, add gas stations to that list. I like the one that has the extra clean gas that cleans my car while I drive, and offers giant sodas. Unless that’s the one that spilled a bunch of oil, in which case I like the one that didn’t spill oil, assuming that one has any sized soft drink or sweet tea for a dollar. Oddly enough, I was in 6 gas stations today, and couldn’t tell you which company I used. I know one of them was across the street from a Freedom station because I turned to my wife and yelled, “freeeeeeeeeedoooooooom.” She then pointed out how there were 3 gas stations on this single intersection, but only 2 on the 106 miles we biked before getting there. It’s almost as if the free market has a hard time dealing with products that are undifferentiated. Resulting in a lot of overlap and redundancy. But if we’ve learned one thing in this thread: redundancy within a company is inefficient, redundancy between companies is competition, and that competition eliminates inefficiencies. ---
**Author:** ![emacknight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@emacknight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/emacknight)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/185 "2010-07-11T05:15:59Z")
> [@Dr.Love](#): > > I don’t understand what it means that “S1\_n mimics S2.” Sorry, it’s really late. If you looked at the routes of any of the 5 smaller companies, S1\_n, what would it resemble: S1 is the complete collection of all the small companies, S1 = sum(S1\_n, n=1-5) S2 was the route created by a single company over the entire area For some reason I’m picturing fractals, perhaps because Colbert did a thing with the Mobius Melt sandwich, and the MandleBLT Set. I think each smaller set looks like S2. And that if any of the smaller companies were to farm it out to 5 sub-contractors, S1\_n would look like S1, a collection of smaller routes. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/186 "2010-07-11T17:40:36Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > With regards to TSP. > > Are we all clear that the issue at hand is comparing 1 large TSP vs 5 small TSP working in the same area, where the 5 small TSPs draw from the client list of the large TSP? No, not at all. I have mentioned several ways to model it, and I can think of lots more. We don’t have enough data or even a sense of what we want to come out of the model yet, so why pin down the method right now? > [@](#): > > Why or why not, please phrase your answers in the form of a question. Why are you continuing to use verbiage instead of building a quantitative model? That’s my question. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/187 "2010-07-11T17:49:30Z")
> [@Dr.Love](#): > > Sure, when you’re using AMPL or LINDO or even C. vBulletin doesn’t have quite the same capabilities. > [@](#): > > So far as I can tell, no one has directly addressed this new argument. Because it is BS and already demonstrated as wrong by the counter arguments that preceded it. The “new” argument does not address any of the issues raised prior, so why bother changing topics? > [@](#): > > reality. The implication from point 5 to 6 (from feasible regions to objective values) depends on the fact that the costs are the same for all companies involved. There are some models out there for which 5 and 6 are both true statements. It has been said many times in many ways on this thread it is unlikely that the cost structures are the same for each of the 5 companies, nor would any of those models necessarily apply to the cost structure of a single provider service. Not that minimizing the overall internal cost of the system is really what he cares about is it? I dunno, I keep asking, but he never quite says. If that is is, then why does he care? Seems like a meaningless statistic to me, for the purposes he wuld be using it for anyway. Because, as I noted earlier, if you don’t tie it to the retail costs, then so what? And unless you are an investor in _all_ of the companies as a group (some sort of trash collection index) then who else would care what the overall system costs are relative to other ways of doing it? > [@](#): > > If you understand the assumptions under which they are true, and why those assumptions do not hold, then maybe some learning can take place in this thread. Cute! You deem lecture me about the points I have been making for 4 pages now. > [@](#): > > You brought up TSP. I’m just running with that. I brought up other models too. What **Sam Stone** and I said was that in any case like this, you have to start by defining the parameters of the problem, and decide what you want to know about the system _before_ you choose a model. so far, precious little of this has taken place. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/188 "2010-07-11T17:52:06Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > You keep asking for stuff that isn’t relevant. Either you don’t understand what’s going on, or you think that’s a masterful debate tactic. In either case we’ve all been ignoring it, but you haven’t caught on. > > All of the supposed variables you think you need don’t matter. Pick a truck capacity, pick a population, pick a street length, pick the colour of the kitten hiding behind the bin, pick the mittens that the kitten wears. > > You are comparing 1 large company vs 5 small ones. Make the trucks the same, the time it takes per pickup the same, labour costs the same, the number of kittens wearing mittens, even throw in some terrorists and snow. All the same. Each time you ask for an irrelevant piece of information, your appeal to authority gets weaker and weaker. But the amusement I get from it grows. Really? You don’t think truck size matters? Then why not devise a truck that is big enough to park on the whole street that can pick up 10 cans at once? Or why not simply use an old fashioned mini pickup? You are a silly boy. Put your dick back in your pants. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/189 "2010-07-11T17:54:20Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Yup, that’s it. > > And once you do that, you can also go the other direction: > > Given that S1 is made up of 5 routes, we can call them S1\_sub\_n, n is 1-5, representing each of the 5 companies. > > Do any of the S1\_sub\_n mimic S2, a single provider going to assigned houses. Or do any of them mimic S1, a collection of 5 routes to what could be considered a random assignment of the entire set? > > My _assertion_ is that S1\_sub\_n, n=1-5, will resemble S2, and that the probability that any of them resemble S1 is P, where P approaches 0. So your argument is simply that because you could drive one truck on the route (sure, such a rute exists), there is NO possible way under ANY circumstances to improve on the “efficiency” of that by using more than one truck? Can you improve on your mythical measure of efficiency in ways that don’t involve adding another truck? If so how? If not, why not? ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/190 "2010-07-11T18:12:22Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Assuming that they all get full up they are covering up to five times as much territory to do so. This means gas, this means man hours this means inefficiency. It doesn’t mean man hours or fuel inefficiency because fewer trucks and men are used per company. You always have overlap within the different zones in any competitive market or otherwise there would be no competition. In the purest sense, competition is inefficient use of resources but it is the most efficient form of cost control. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/191 "2010-07-11T18:13:02Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > I don’t think anything is going to convince you that 5 trucks and 5 crews covering the same block are “LIKELY” to be less efficient than a single truck with a single crew. Its all up in the air until you get granular detail. Neither Sam Stone or I said anything other than that - we don’t have enough information on the particulars of this case, but that it is certainly possible that 5 trucks are more efficient. When you say “more likely” what do you mean? That if you measure all one truck solutions, for all values of all parameters, against all n-truck solutions for all values of all parameters (and the parameters are not likely to be the same), you come out better one way or another x% of the time. It is Sunday, so I plead that as an excuse, but what is the exact point you are making? My intuition tells me there are infinite independent cases in each, so how will you compare? > [@](#): > > You don’t think the baseball schedule is centrally coordinated? The schedule is, but the traveling isn’t. My understanding is each team has a “traveling secretary” - fairly high level position - to deal with travel BTW, creating a centralized baseball schedule is no trivial modeling matter either…somewhat better now that teams don’t share stadiums with other uses such as football as much as they used to, but still…actually, relatively easy to model compared to this topic, so worth doing for fun sometime. > [@](#): > > You asked if the auction system was anything less than ideal and I gave you an example of when it has been less than ideal. thanks for the insight. Its getting off topic form here, but I will just say I was thinking of the initial auctions in the US compared to various European auctions. I was thinking more of the failures of the auctions themselves due to poor acution design than any resulting issues to consumers. IOW, was the auction itself effective for the purpose intended? > [@](#): > > When 4G systems roll out, you will see the two market giants grabbing even larger shares of the market as almost every phone manufacturer is going to happily manufacture phones for them and then scratch their heads as they try and figure out if its worth making phones for this substandard signal range and sell them to dozens of smaller carriers. The smaller carriers have now taken to trying to get the larger carriers to let their customers roam on their networks the way that long distance carriers can use AT&T’s networks. Getting off topic enough maybe for its own thread, but I’d ask why the smaller ones are in the market at all then? How do they justify that to their investors? That they will be acquired and earn ROI that way? > [@](#): > > What advantages do you see to having up to 7 overlapping systems of cell towers in the same area? I live in a rural enough area that towers are not overlapping in many cases. I live on the very edge of Sprint service for instance, and have had a tower engineer out to my place, and he took me to the local tower. The local tower came to Sprint via an acquisition before I lived here. they are no interested in repositioning the antennas now that the town has grown, or adding new towers. But they are happy to let me roam on the other towers. So without the overlapping towers (which still barely cover me) I would have no service at all. > [@](#): > > Lets take railroads for example. Sure you could see a use for multiple railroad tracks from Pittsburgh to Detroit but as some point are you really getting much out of the nth set of railroad tracks? Of course. No one is saying more is always better. It depends on the parameters of each situation. But someone IS saying fewer is always better, regardless of the parameters. **EMacK** seems to not even accept that there are parameters to his problem, as he keeps presenting a proof that does not contain any parameters. Weird! ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/192 "2010-07-11T18:14:04Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Anything in there spell out exactly what I considered the goals of the comparison/efficiencies to be? You know, the goals/efficiencies you kept asking for over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over? Feel free to remind us specifically. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/193 "2010-07-11T18:19:11Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > In my area, we used to have dozens of trash companies and it caused all sorts of problems with traffic. So the country passed a law saying that residential trash bins had to be 40 gallons and within 2 years most neighborhoods were served by one or two trash companies. In fact companies started to standardize pickup days so that your trash is picked up Tuesdays and Fridays, no matter which company you use and recycling is on Thursdays. Sounds similar to where the OP is now I guess. Note that you are pointing out some of the parameters we have addressed - do all the trucks come on the same day? Are the bins standardized or not? > [@](#): > > OK so when you say commodity, you are talking about commodities as defined by the futures exchanges. I think people use the term commodity more colloquially than that. I think people (other than you) have been using the term commodity to mean substantially indifferentiable products or services. Yes, that is true. But we are trying to achieve precision, and it is wrong to say the products at he OP’s house are not differentiated. He might not care about the differences, but they are there. Others might care. That’s not an uncommon situation in general - maybe we need a better word than “commodity” for it. But my understanding, based on the menu of different services offered by the OP, is that there is differentiations, just that his needs falls squarely in the overlap of the services, and not in the differences, so he doesn’t care much. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/194 "2010-07-11T18:22:25Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Oops, just realized we need to clarify another point: > > We are comparing 1 large company vs 5 small companies. > > We are NOT comparing 1 truck vs 5 trucks. > > Sorry if any of you were half way through your models. > > So from that, each company can use as many trucks as they want/need. But it should be noted, the 5 small companies will have to use at least 1. Yes, we covered that. Any model comparison would have to address from 1-\>n companies, each of which has from 1-\>t trucks, among many other things of course. Companies are of course free to choose the number of trucks they deem best. I thought of something late last night I want to ask you. You say you see 5 trucks on your street. Does that happen every week? I also wonder what happens as the trucks move further away from your street - do they all follow the same path around town like a train? ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/195 "2010-07-11T18:27:37Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > It’s almost as if the free market has a hard time dealing with products that are undifferentiated. Resulting in a lot of overlap and redundancy. If only the government would make that competition go away and decide where a single gas station company should be. You are missing the bigger point - all of the industries you mention are delivering _standardized_ products. Woud you, for instance prefer that gasoline or telephone service NOT be standardized, so that products were not interoperable? Maybe you would prefer a car that only used Freedom gas, and phone that can only call other Verizon phones. Would that be sufficiently differentiated in your mind? Why do you think that _doesn’t_ happen? > [@](#): > > But if we’ve learned one thing in this thread: redundancy within a company is inefficient, redundancy between companies is competition, and that competition eliminates inefficiencies. “We” have learned no such thing. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/196 "2010-07-11T18:29:51Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Sorry, it’s really late. > I think each smaller set looks like S2. And that if any of the smaller companies were to farm it out to 5 sub-contractors, S1\_n would look like S1, a collection of smaller routes. Now you are going to say that trash pickup schedules are _fractal_ in nature? Do you even know what that means mathematically? ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/197 "2010-07-11T18:32:37Z")
> [@](#): > > Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi > Assuming that they all get full up they are covering up to five times as much territory to do so. This means gas, this means man hours this means inefficiency. But not necessarily 5x more gas. Maybe smaller truck is more efficient than bigger truck. Same with labor. Maybe bigger truck has more labor costs. Or maintenance costs. Until you list it all out, you can’t really know how it is. Haven’t I said this before? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2010, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/198 "2010-07-11T21:29:12Z")
Size breeds its own inefficiencies. When IBM wanted to make a home PC to get into competition they went outside the company for the whole thing. They knew that with all the layers of management and people involved in all the projects, that it would take too long and cost too much in house. That is when the door opened for Gates. Yet in America we have buyout after buyout, merger after merger and pretend efficiency is one of the reasons for allowing them. It stifles competition and development of better products, and allows them to set prices. There is no good from allowing oligarchy. We are less competitive, less creative and charge more. ---
**Author:** ![emacknight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@emacknight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/emacknight)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2010, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/199 "2010-07-12T02:32:19Z")
> [@Magiver](#): > > It doesn’t mean man hours or fuel inefficiency because fewer trucks and men are used per company. You always have overlap within the different zones in any competitive market or otherwise there would be no competition. > > In the purest sense, competition is inefficient use of resources but it is the most efficient form of cost control. There, that’s the debate I wanted to have. So you said, “competition is inefficient use of resources.” Why are we okay to have resources wasted to competition, but not in a government run program? Waste is waste. In any city that has city trash removal, residents (tax payers) have an expectation that not only is trash removed (the minimum acceptable standard) but that their money isn’t wasted. I’m not trying to create a strawman, I really believe people would lose their shit if W5 (is that still on the air?) ran an expose showing government run dump trucks driving in circles. Heads would roll. And I seriously doubt anyone would say, “well, at least they employed lots of people, and bought lots of gas.” I consider WM to be an extremely well managed company, and made a shit ton of money off them when it popped back in February. I plan to add them back to my portfolio within the next few weeks (3.8% dividend, low P/E ratio, and it just broke above its 30 moving average). I have every confidence that both their residential collection and recycling collection is as efficient as it can be. But if I ever heard that they had a system that looked like the amalgamation of all 5 companies (S1), I’d short them as fast as I could. Likewise, if a government run system had the level of redundancies found in S1, I’d be pissed. So why is that level of redundancy tolerated in the free market? It will still cost money, and that has to come from somewhere. I want to eliminate the redundancy, but somehow maintain enough competition to control pricing. I also want a pony. Replacing the 5 companies with 1 will eliminate the redundancies, and should cost less to operate that the total of 5 companies. But without competition, there is no reason for them to pass the cost off to the consumer. Putting in price controls encourages shortcuts leading to disaster. I like the thought of having yearly bids for the city contract. Competition for the contract will drive the price down. But I’m not sure what would happen to the other 4 companies in the mean time. I was also thinking more about this _churn_ effect. Right now, the only thing stopping me from switching companies is information: I don’t know what all the others are charging right now. If someone was to collect that information and display it on a large digital sign, I’d be switching back and forth weekly. We could have a little mercantile market for trash removal. As I said before, the free market has a really hard time dealing with undifferentiable products and services. Imagine a commodities market for cellphone time. Garbage just happens to be one of those weird ones that we all need, and in most places the government takes care of. Ditto for electricity, water, sewage, natural gas, roads, and snow removal. None of those examples make sense using the 5 company system. Like I said, we’d have 5 lines running to each neighbourhood. 5 gas lines, waterlines, sewage lines. I was stuck behind a city bus this afternoon waiting to turn right, and it gave me a LOT of time to consider: what if there were 5 independent bus companies offering public transport. They’d all be running on the same major routes, making the same stops, and I’d get to wait behind 5 of them. It’s actually a fun thought experiment. I imagine companies would team up with major destinations like malls, so one company would have exclusive rights to stop there, everyone else would have to stop down the street and take an overpriced shuttle bus. They’d all go for the most profitable routes and times, so service would drop off in less used areas. Good times. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2010, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/200 "2010-07-12T02:41:55Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > There, that’s the debate I wanted to have. > > So you said, “competition is inefficient use of resources.” Why are we okay to have resources wasted to competition, but not in a government run program? Waste is waste. > . I’m not really sure how to frame your argument or a response to it. When I think of government waste I think of my tax money not being efficiently spent which is a function of return on investment. When I buy groceries I don’t think of the redundancy of having 5 grocery stores in the community I go to. In fact I actually drive past a store that is considered to be within walking distance of my house. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719.md?page=11)