Governmental Ineffeciency?

Great Debates
41

Feel free to demonstrate this then in an apples to apples way. AFAIK, historically ALL medicine in the ‘selling poisonous medicines’ time frame were bad, whether regulated or unregulated. This isn’t a discussion about whether or not the government should regulate the industry btw, nor about how effective said regulations are. I’m not disputing that things like the Pure Food and Water act haven’t saved lives or are a good thing…I think they are. But the discussion is whether or not the government is efficient.

They aren’t. But then, they aren’t set up to be. I’m not even sure an efficient government is necessarily a good thing.

-XT

42

He didn’t mention subsidies - you did. Not to mention that he’s probably right, because the business models are totally different. UPS has a good transport system, but a small number of delivery centers, and a delivery model based on deliveries to a small number of locations relative to the total. The Post Office delivers everywhere every day. UPS has efficient routing algorithms to maximize driver efficiency. The Post Office doesn’t need them, because almost everyone gets some mail nearly every day. At least we do, and when I delivered mail one summer it was a rare day when I didn’t have to stop at every single house on my route. So the UPS model would break down if they had to deliver junk mail all of a sudden.

43

Voyager, let me ask you something. Who do you suppose paid for setting up all those delivery routes, trucks, cars, planes, etc etc, to produce the current USPS mail system? Did they get venture capital from banks and private funding, then do an IPO to raise the capital necessary to create all that structure? Are they running their business in the black…or did I just hear that they are closing something like 700 PO’s throughout the country due to the fact that there is red ink all over their balance sheets?

-XT

44

snicker Have you ever worked in a large company? You think each employee just scrimps and saves for the good of the bottom line. Pull the other, it has bells on.

Case in point, which I’ve used in a paper. A friend of mine was working for a company that sold relatively inexpensive and highly efficient test equipment. When they went on sales calls, he naturally thought that this stuff, which could replace a tester 10 times as expensive that took up 10 times the room would be an easy sale. (We own some, and it is as good as advertised.) What he found was that the managers had prestige tied to the amount of room they controlled, and reducing that room was not a think they liked. Another reason is that a big capital purchase has to go to the board often, and the manager gets face time with a lot of high level execs he hardly sees. The cheaper tester doesn’t need such high level approval. Again, this is a bug, not a feature.

45

Can you think of any example of a valid comparison between a government agency and a private company? Or is the OP unanswerable, because no single standard for “efficiency” can be applied to both?

46

WPA built some. :slight_smile: I don’t see what the point is. UPS get get by with fewer stations because they have a different model. Sure there are efficiencies when your physical plant is fully paid for, so what? Just another reason, which was implied by my response, that UPS would have problems if they had to deliver junk mail suddenly.

The problems with the Post Office today have nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with the movement away from paper mail to electronic mail. I think their volume has gone down more than 10%. Record stores didn’t go out of business because they suddenly got inefficient, it was because people started buying (or stealing) music on-line. Do you pay bills electronically? Do you get bills electronically? Send e-cards instead of real cards? Read a magazine on-line instead of a hard copy? Each one of these cuts down on volume. I don’t see how a private Post Office wouldn’t be doing the same. In any case, if you call shutting down locations inefficient the private sector has the public sector beat by a mile.

47

That’s not quite true. The PC was designed and manufactured inside of IBM. They went outside for components, like the processor and OS, which was perfectly reasonable since their product line was so different, and they wanted it out fast, which they could do if they didn’t have to build everything from scratch.

48

Ask yourself this, when is the last time you went into a governmental or quasi-governmental company and got good service? I can’t think of a time when I got good service from the post office. I get OK service, but I’ve never in 45 years said to myself, “Wow good service, or what a nice clerk.” In Chicago, we have mailmen that deliver the mail in a tank top undershirt. You know the ones they call “wife-beaters.” When is the last time you saw ANY private company that would allow someone to make deliveries in an undershirt.

Social Security is a nightmare, state agencies are a joke. Governmental workers are way overpaid when compared to a free market.

I will say our Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is the only place I’ve ever run into pleasent people. Oh sure there are a lot of rude bus drivers, but I have had many nice bus drivers too.

Elected people serve not a company but getting elected again. They depend on votes and they get these votes by dishing out jobs to people who will vote for them. You can see how easily efficency dies off. Oftentimes you will see, especially at a local level less than 15% of the eligible voters in a local (City or county level type) will even vote. Therefore you can win office, easily by making sure the people in governemental jobs will vote for you. How do you do that? Give them stuff.

ABC news pointed out that since the year 2000, less than 25,000 governmental employees on all federal and state levels have been dismissed for inefficency or poor quality of work. This amounts to LESS than 2,800 employees each year. And a lot of those were dismissed as a reaction to the Anthrax attacks and 9-11 in 2001

Here’s a great example of governmental inefficency.

Did you ever see those ads on TV by lawyers who specialize in getting you social security disability if you’ve been rejected.

Think about this now. This is a whole SPECIALTY in lawfirms. This is a WHOLE SPECIALITY that is devoted to proving that social security is denying benefits to those who SHOULD be getting them.

Social security WRONGLY turns down so many people that enough lawyers can make a living suing them.

That is ludicrous. Whoever turns down claims incorrectly needs to simply be let go, 'cause they don’t know their job. Perhaps this should be coupled with a simplification of rules.

The bottom line amounts to there are no checks to government. Without checks you have an unregulated monopoly. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the salary of a big city mayor is $75,000/year and the guy holding that job, COULD be making $300,000/year in the private sector, there’s a reason why he’s in that job.

49

As a general rule, there should be no ability to directly compare the two.

Government exists among people to do those things that we will not do for ourselves. This includes via the private free market. As an example, when education in this country was something you had to go out and purchase, there were large numbers of people who went uneducated, as they could not afford the cost of education, and/or were unable to obtain privately provided education. So we socialized education of our children. Thus, to try and compare if public education is more “efficient” than privately provided education is very difficult, since privately provided education doesn’t do everything that publically provided education does.

Now, maybe if we required every private educator to accept any student who applies for education, regardless of ability or disability, and required these private educators to meet the same standards that public education must, etc., we might find out which is more “efficient” at what it does. But, of course, we’d still have the issue that the cost of the education would be beyond the means of many; if we used so-called “backpack” funding to solve this (by requiring the government to pay private educators a subsidized sum for every student who they teach), we’d probably remove some of the incentive to be efficient, because, in essence, we’d start duplicating the current public education system.

But our education system is perhaps a good place to discuss this idea of privitization of governmental functions. Could we establish a system of privately provided universal education? What would we have to do in the way of governmental regulation to make that possible? Would the result be more “efficient?” That is, would students be educated to the same level for less money, or would students receive a better education for the same money?

As someone upthread pointed out: trying to compare something like governmentally provided roads with privately provided roads is nearly impossible: the two systems would have different objectives, which is precisely why we choose to have a government.

Case in point: fire services, which were once privately provided, a system that was not efficient in the sense of providing adequate universal coverage. :eek:

ETA: Markxxx, what nonsense. :rolleyes: Sometimes someone is in the public sector because they believe they can provide a needed service, and want to do so regardless of salary concerns.

50

Pretty much every day at my post office.

Social Security after my husband died was extremely kind and efficient.

Last time I got tags it took about three minutes, and the only reason I had to go in was that I forgot to request them online.

Ask me when was the last time I had good service from my cable company or my credit cards.
I forgot to ask for a cite for

They aren’t being sued, their decision is being appealed, as far as my understanding goes.

51

Let’s see…the last time I went to the post office…the last time I went to the DMV…when I got my passport…those were all a while ago…oh yes, the folks at the emissions testing facility two weeks ago were quick and courteous, and registering the car online is hassle-free.

I can’t say as I’ve ever seen a difference between public and private clerks. In fact I prefer the public ones because they don’t keep trying to sell me stuff I don’t want, they just process what needs processing.

52

I have, many times:

Post office? Sure, even recently. My postal carrier is a gem, as are the people at my nearby office. Nicer by far than the local UPS, for sure.

Unemployment insurance? Definitely! Met some great folks there, actually. A couple people made my life a LOT easier when I was unemployed. Calling them life-savers would not be a stretch.

Universities? I went to two state universities, and had outstanding professors and ran into lots of great staff people, too. To be fair, the private university was great, too, but certainly not better.

National Parks? Park service employees in my experience have been terrific.

Military? I’ve got no complaints. Our volunteer, tax-support military is the most powerful that has ever existed on the planet, and they do a pretty good job staying away from tampering with our democratically-elected government.

IRS? Well, they do what they’re supposed to do. When I’ve I had questions, I was treated politely and promptly.

And as an employee at a major, state-funded university, I assure you I try very hard to provide great service and there are serious, direct consequences if I do not.

But really, if you think profit makes something efficient, you clearly have never worked. Are you going to try to get me to believe that every employee at a business–even a small one–was a model of service? Always kept the bottom line of the company in mind? Never wasted time? Never wasted resources? Was always clearly qualified for the job they were doing?

I’ve worked in big government agencies, and small ones. I’ve worked in big businesses, and small ones. I’ve worked in big non-for-profits, and small ones. Whether the organization has been principally about making money or not has never been observed by me to make the least difference in terms of:
[ul]
[li]whether the employees were necessarily good at the what they did (actually, gov’t and non-profit did better at this in my experience)[/li][li]whether the employees wasted time and resources or not (again, actually if anything this was a little worse at big companies)[/li][li]whether there was good communication between hierarchies[/li][li]whether employees provided good service to customers.[/li][/ul]

The only thing I can say from my experience that makes an clear, obvious difference is size, and whether my boss was a tool (admittedly, the worst tool of a boss I ever had was at a non-profit.)

53

I entirely agree with this.

54

To all you fools claiming that public governmental clerks were nicer than their private enterprise counterparts:

It’s because they’re overpaid, underworked because you know governments over-spend and over-hire as a type of job-bank welfarism, and have an evil, cursed union protecting their lifetime employment, duh. FREE MARKET RULEZ!

55

Yesterday my wife had to go to the California DMV. She had to wait a long time for an appointment due to furloughs and cutbacks, but she was in and out in 10 minutes, with excellent and friendly service. The people in the Post Office down the street from my office are always friendly and efficient. Any holdups I’ve observed have been purely customer based.

I’ve never seen that in any place I lived. I must admit that when I delivered mail one summer I sometimes wish I could have done it in an undershirt. The next time you get rotten service at a department store, are you going to condemn all of private industry also?

My father and father-in-law, both in their 90s, have never had one problem with Social Security. As for being overpaid, the President and the Cabinet sure make CEO wages, don’t they? :rolleyes: Engineers for the government make a hell of a lot less than I do. At lower levels the government actually pays a living wage, and provides good benefits, but I don’t consider not ripping off workers the way a lot of private companies do a problem.

Believe it or not, some people believe in public service and aren’t greedy turds. Horrors.

Perhaps you’d have better experience with the public sector if you didn’t approach them with the attitude that they are all overpaid lazy slobs. The only common thing in all your relationships with the public sector is you.

56

Honestly, no. They have very different functions…and we WANT them to have very different functions. The government is there to be an arbiter and to provide various services to the people. They aren’t there to make their ‘customers’ (i.e. The People) a profit. Business, on the other hand, is oriented towards profit. We don’t want them to be an arbiter and it is expected of them to make a profit.

I don’t have a problem with the government doing what we pay it to do…to regulate, to act as an arbiter, to at least attempt to carry out our will and to look out for our collective interests. I do’t expect nor want business to do the same thing.

The point would be that we paid for all of that infrastructure, and we paid for all of the other stuff the USPS uses through taxes. That’s where the ‘subsidy’ aspect comes in. Assuming we (collectively) want the service of junk mail continued then I have no doubt that, assuming we were willing to pay for it (either directly or indirectly) that FedEX or UPS or any of the other carriers (or perhaps several of them collectively) could do the same job. They don’t do said job nor attempt to penetrate that market because the USPS is already doing it using the governments dime and the profit in it for them is marginal under those circumstances. Take the USPS out of the equations (or cut it back, as we seem to be doing) and I have zero doubts that, if it is indeed a necessary or desired service that someone will fill the void…and do so at a profit.

-XT

57

When a company becomes inefficient it (eventually) goes out of business or it remakes itself into a more efficient company. That kind of pressure doesn’t exist on the government (how often do you see a government go insolvent?)

58

Alot of times, actually.

That our government hasn’t been met with insolvency may be suggestive of it’s well-runnedness?

59

They lose elections instead.

And companies are perfectly capable of creating situations where they can be extremely inefficient and still prosper, especially in the low-to-no regulations environment the free marketers want. Monopolies, price fixing coalitions, company towns and so forth. A government that needs to worry about re-election is going to be a lot more responsive that a monopoly or near-monopoly that can just sneer at your complaints since you’ll probably end up buying from them anyway.

60

Especially if the government is there to bail them out, ehe? And especially if the government creates the specialized environments through regulation that fosters inefficiencies in a business and their model of operations.

Oh…but you weren’t talking about any of that, right?

Can you show me one that happened due to government avoidance instead of direct or indirect government assistance?

Really. Have you considered…California vs, say, GM? Which entity is more responsive to customer complaints?

-XT