But you could very easily make the argument that while governments are directly accountable to customer complaints, corporations are only derivatively so (governments are elected by people who wield power, corporations only respond to consumers because of the profit motive of the shareholder-owner)
further, you could make an argument that as companies globalize, the degree to which any group of consumers can make a difference is reduced, as any group makes up a proportionally smaller share of the company’s consumer groups.
Even with the Postal Office reporting a jaw-dropping billion dollar loss, the public is not hand-wringing about whether there’ll be changes to mail delivery or whether they’ll be a thousandfold spike in postage fees. The Post Office is linked with the permanency of the Federal government and will continue to provide the same high-quality service our ancestors received at the lowest postage rate. So yes, the government is more efficient and at mail delivery than private industry. FedEx and UPS are in terrible shape and are likely to go the way of the Pony Express.
There is no question that the government can be efficient in some areas. The ability to compel people under force of law and to write the rules of the game through regulation gives government some inherent advantages. The ability to draw from an almost unlimited pool of taxpayer funds or print its own currency gives it other advantages.
One of the reasons Social Security has a low administration cost is that it the SSA doesn’t work nearly as hard at preventing fraud as do private insurers. It doesn’t care, because the money comes from taxpayers anyway. So it may have lower administration costs, but the overall cost may be higher because of fraud. Does that make it more efficient?
The government doesn’t always follow its own environmental laws or other regulations. Does that make it more efficient?
A better approach to take in this debate would be to talk about what the drivers of efficiency are, and what the requirements are for efficient operations, and then talk about whether government or private industry is better able to exploit them.
In addition, it’s important to distinguish government as some theoretical perfect bureaucracy from government as it exists in the real world. Any discussion of governmental efficiency that doesn’t take into account the nature of Congress and its relationship to special interests is flawed.
The argument I will make is that government is inefficient when it rules by fiat and does not work within the normal limits of the market. It’s inefficient because it lacks information. It’s inefficient because it has an incentive structure that does not reward efficiency. It’s inefficient because it has poor feedback mechanisms. It’s inefficient because it is a monopoly and therefore does not have competition to keep it on its toes and to punish it when it makes poor choices.
These are serious structural issues with government that are pretty hard to get around. Imagine a company that was fed an unlimited amount of money by a rich benefactor who made no demands of performance, which had a total monopoly on its market, and which would exist and even grow regardless of whether it ever turned a profit. Just how efficient do you think that company would be? What incentives would that company have to be efficient? How would it even KNOW if it was operating efficiently? Why would it care?
Can you imagine a private equivalent of the Department of Education, spending 80 billion dollars a year on a ‘service’ which never produced a single educational improvement by any reaonable standard? Imagine if there were many private education management firms, and schools signed up with the one which provided the best results at the lowest cost. Where would the DOE wind up? How long would it be able to continue raising capital and pissing it away?
Both actually…though in the case of California they are giving the customers (a.k.a. the voters) what they are asking for, not what they need…and without regard to reality. In the case of GM, while they may not be as responsive as you or others might wish, it’s pretty obvious that they have been responsive. Just look at their line up of hybrid vehicles and the development they have done on electric and hydrogen powered vehicles.
I’m sorry, I seemed to miss the responsiveness as I was waltzing towards the Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York. I stopped for a few billion in bailouts which delayed my arrival, to boot.
No, YOU are missing the point. Who do you think is paying that billion dollars? The customers are. The government is inefficient in this case precisely because it can play the shell game of hiding its horrendous losses by subsidizing the post office out of the general fund and spreading the damage across the population as a whole.
If you reformed the postal service so that it wasn’t allowed to run at a loss, and forced it to raise postage rates if it went into the red, you’d see a lot more opposition to the post office. You’d also see a lot more people stop using it, which would raise their per-letter costs even more. This would force them to actually be more efficient. While you’re at it, remove their monopoly on first-class mail so that people can seek out other options. Make them compete with everyone else on an even footing. Then the post office might actually become more efficient.
And, as such, they have no competition-so there is no drive to lower costs, improve efficiencies. Take the court system-in MA, it is slow, expensive, and error-prone. The judges don’t want to reform the system, and the court employees don’t-so service (to the users of the service) is poor.If there was a viable alternative (like arbitration) the court system MIGHT improve.
Well, back in 1996 the old inefficient post office had a $1.5 billion profit. Cite. A quick google found other years with profits. That could have paid off a lot of buildings. I don’t know how the finances were done, but it is perfectly possible that the Post Office paid for its own buildings, and has historically returned money to the taxpayers.
As for junk mail, I suspect it is a dying business also, as companies can contact their customers more often and less expensively by email. The management of FedEx and UPS are way too smart to want to make an investment in that business. They might agree to manage existing USPS property, but I’d suspect it would be hard to make a business case for taking over the business, at least anything like it is today. Maybe they could make a go of it with 1 delivery a week or something.
Yes. Judges love overflowing dockets where they are effectively rushed through a process that ought to be deliberated through. And, of course, privately-paid, billed-by-the-hour attorneys have incentive to speed things up
Got anymore unsubstantiated bashing to do tonight?
Yes. Being in the red because there isn’t sufficient use of your products while your customer base loves the fact that your products are univerally available is how all private business works, don’tcha know?
The competitors of the post office cherry pick the packages that are profitable and leave the rest . UPS would go under if they had to deliver it all, or they would jack prices sky high.
Are there any products or services that cover all or nearly all of a population without any government help? Is there anything we can look to and say, “Hey, here is a market that is completely free yet it has universal coverage”? If there isn’t anything universal, what’s the closest?
No, I wasn’t because reality has little to do with that old bit of propaganda. It isn’t the government and it’s evil, evil regulations that creates monopolies; it’s the simple, practical fact that it’s profitable to be one, and that a big company has all sorts of ways to crush a smaller company no matter how efficient it is. Especially without those evil government regulations.
Nor do regulations automatically “foster inefficiency” - quite the opposite, if inefficiency is more profitable and more destructive. Nor does it matter, since an unregulated marketplace guarantees disaster after disaster, and I see no reason why any amount of “efficiency” is worth that.
Most of them? Monopolies are a natural and rather obvious endpoint of capitalist competition. One company wins, and puts itself in an unassailable position. The idea that monopolies exist because of the government is an ideologically driven fantasy; without government interference there would be far more of them. Which is why since breaking them up has become politically unpopular fewer and fewer corporations control everything over time.
Well, dude, if you want to unhinge the the Post Office from the Federal Government, you’d have to change innumerable laws in the Federal Registrar, a tangle of Supreme Court decisions, and ratify a constitutional amendment to strike out “to establish Post Office and post Roads” in the U.S Constitution. If the constitutional burden of a taxpayer-subsidized Post Office is too much bear, you can always renounce your American citizenship. It’d be a lot easier than trying to hold a Constitutional Convention to make the Post Office a fully private organization. In any case. Good luck.
And who got the billion dollar profit in 1996? The public also. I haven’t found any information about the profitability of the Post Office over time, I suspect it is cash positive. The problem now is not inefficiency, as I’ve noted.
Only if you’d tell private businesses to do the same thing. And raising prices when you are losing money through customers going to new ways of getting the job done is not exactly very smart. You think GM should have raised prices when losing money? The record labels when sales were falling?
As for the monopoly on first class mail, why don’t you give us a business plan where it is more efficient to provide the service of home delivery with multiple companies each moving mail from multiple locations? How much money would a startup lose delivering small volumes of mail everywhere for the same price as the Post Office does? Would you force them to deliver to farms as well as to the crowded cities? Or would tell people in small towns, who’d be ignored by the startups and getting less service from the Post Office now in worse shape with the cream skimmed off the top to go fuck themselves? But enjoy it, because they are getting screwed for the glory of the free market.
That’s the difference between government and private enterprise. Business exists to make a profit. Government exists to serve the people in its area. This is a perfect example of that difference.
Good examples. As an old Bell System guy, we lost money on lots of customers, but made it up with higher long distance charges. It’s easier now that the infrastructure the Bell System built is in place. I wonder if the free markers think that running a phone line to a farm 10 miles from nowhere was ever going to turn a profit?