Agreed?
If so … why?
What steps could be taken to make the federal governement more efficient and less wasteful? Things a politician could run on and put in place in four years.
Two words: benevolent dictatorship.
It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it works pretty well. Of course, when it doesn’t, you end up with things like the Great Purges, the Cultural Revolution, and Year Zero.
Representative democracy, like public education, is the art of moving toward the palatable mean. It ain’t generally all that great, but it also only rarely results in mass bloodshed and unbridled exploitation.
Stranger
I’m damned if I know what can be done about it, but I have a pretty good idea of the why of it. Efficiently run businesses are run in such a way that encourages more profit, which means discouraging waste. The government, as such, has no profit motive. Therefore, there’s no real incentive to discourage waste.
I’m not sure if you mean the legislative process, or the execution and overseeing of the government’s various mandates (health, education, military, roads, security, etc, etc, etc.
There’s a difference between organizations that have to compete against others, and those that do not. The former have to execute accurately and efficiently to maintain an edge in the marketplace; the latter get funded regardless of how they perform.
Now, if this sounds like a right-wingers argument against Big Government, so be it. I am sympathetic to the government “doing things for us”. I wish they would do it better!
A number of things:
Accountability: the chain of command is at some stage comprised of elective politicians and they only are interested in instilling friends and eliminating enemies rather than ensuring the best people are on the job.
Paying for skills: at the bottom of the organization the government pays well in terms of salaries and benefits, but at the management level they do not. You get what you pay for.
What can be done? Somehow implement a culture of overseeing, audit and accountability. Make the first level below the politicians more visible and powerful with a well understood role: manage costs and efficiencies.
Government waste is Standard Operating Procedure in Canada and the US. I’d be interested to know if it’s that way everywhere.
Large, Fast, Unwasteful: Pick Any Two.
Governments are no different from businesses - the larger they are, the slower and more wastefully they are run due to the number of layers of bureaucracy required. If you have enough oversite, it can run efficiantly but not quickly. If speed is required, you are going to have a lot of waste and less oversite, therefore a greater probability of corruption. The best situation is a business/governement small enough for a single honest, business-savvy person to oversee at all levels. Other than a small town, good luck with that.
We have the Federal government, which is split into three branches. Then you have fifty state governments and a few territories and finally local governments. At every level government is staffed by two parties each of whom is at least as concerned with defaming the other as with solving problems. It’s not a recipie for efficiency.
Also, businesses have to deal with a specific market, while the government has to deal with the whole country. And no one cares whether the CEO of Globex corp is pro-life or pro-choice.
And which requires not just a benevolent dictator, but an entire populace (including direct subordinates) willing to submit to his rule. Any challenge or dissent would bring to an end either the dictatorship or the benevolence.
Governments are very different from large businesses. Large businesses have to justify every decision they make to their shareholders, and as a result every manager up and down the chain has to justify his/her decisions to the next manager up the line. There is intensive scrutiny on all decisions all the time.
Here’s an old trope worth revisiting. In order of efficiency:
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Spending your own money on your own things. You have an incentive to spend the least possible, and to extract the most value for each dollar.
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Spending your own money on other people. You still have an incentive to control spending, but you won’t focus as much on whether there is real value in what you buy.
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Spending other people’s money on things for other people. Now you have little incentive to either control spending or to make sure you buy things of value.
Government fits into the third category. The politicians take your money and spend money oon your behalf. They have neither the incentive to conserve nor an incentive to get maximum value for your dollars. Thus they are controlled by secondary effects - the votes of the people, the amount of financing they can raise from special interests, etc.
Politicians routinely spend billions of dollars on ‘earmarks’ - things that neither the government requested or the people asked for, but which benefit them specifically by helping special interests. Do you know what would happen to a manager in a large company if he allocated 233 million dollars to a bridge that wasn’t in the company’s fiscal plan and which had no customers? He’d be cashiered on the spot. In government, if you pull that stunt you get funding by the people who benefit from the bridge, which you can then use to buy advertising to convince the people you’re a good guy and stay elected.
This is just one of the many forms of corruption and inefficiency that is unique to government. There are many more.
I can’t think of any examples of it happening, and if it did, there is no reason to believe it would work better than a democracy.
Governments are inefficient by nature; it makes no difference how the person at the top is selected.
The degree of success of a benevolent dictatorship is directly proportional to how much the benevolent dictator keeps his grubby mitts off of the economy.
You could say that the British governorship of Hong Kong was a benevolent dictatorship done right - the ‘dictator’ ruled by not ruling - by declaring Laissez-faire to be the law of the land and letting the economy evolve naturally.
Other forms of ‘benevolent dictatorship’ ultimately fail or result in a little less benevolence than you’d think.
Many governments, even democratic governments, are well-run for organizations of their size. I’ve never heard of anyone complain of incompetence or inefficiency in the Japanese government.
Sam Stone, that’s not really a fair comparison - 233 million dollars to the US government is not the same amount of money as 233 million dollars to ANY business in the world.
$233 million is less than .01% of the estimated total reciepts of the US Government for 2007, and even lower as a percentage of total spending. Let’s make a comparison with a large company, Google.
Google’s total revenue for 2006 was about $10.6 billion. Cite .01% of that is a bit over a million dollars. So let’s say that a group of Google’s upper-level managers get together and hammer out a spending plan. One guy slips in an expenditure for a bit over $1 million for his department, with the reason given that it’s for faster servers and updated desktop computers for employees.
(Note: This is to make a roughly comparable case with the “Bridge to Nowhere”. There were already transportation options to the island, but they were not as convenient as a bridge would be. Similarly, new computers would be faster and more productive, but they aren’t necessary.)
It’s then discovered that the servers aren’t horribly slow, and the employees’ desktops still work just fine and are in no need of an upgrade. The manager throws a bit of a fit, threatening to quit (like Sen. Ted Stevens), but in the end the money is earmarked for something else.
Does that manager get fired? Maybe. Maybe not. It certainly isn’t a slam-dunk. Throwing a fit once in a while isn’t enough to get rid of high-level managers or executives. (Hell, throwing a chair doesn’t even get you evicted at Microsoft.) Asking for more money than you really need for your department undoubtedly happens. Each person looks out for their own departments, so that they’ll get funding and continue to work as well as possible so that the manager can continue to show results. In short, I don’t see how your example shows any significant difference between government and business.
Your claim that this type of corruption and inefficiency is unique to governments baffles me. As we speak, millions of dollars are continuing to be wasted on a high-definition format war that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about. And there are (or soon will be) drives available that will read both, making the entire thing a terrific example of inefficiency. This is not helping the companies involved, so far as I can tell. As we speak, millions of dollars are continuing to be wasted on “Digital Rights Management” technologies that will annoy legitimate users and have no effect on piracy. The members of the RIAA think that suing file-traders is a viable alternative to having a workable modern business model. If they had bought or copied Napster close to a decade ago, they’d be ten times what iTunes is now.
Businesses do stupid, unprofitable things constantly. Not all the time, of course, or they wouldn’t still be in business. But the same holds true of government. For every “Bridge to Nowhere” there’s a “Do Not Call List” or a “Civil Rights Act”. And for every Google there’s an Enron. The question isn’t whether governments are “efficient”. The question is what they are efficient at. Governments are terrible at directly generating a profit (although they invest in infrastructure that indirectly leads to all the profit generated under their purview). And businesses are terrible at directly addressing human rights and welfare (although they generate wealth which indirectly increases general human happiness and welfare).
Two questions for those who think so poorly of governments: If they’re so bad, why do we all have them? Why do we fight so hard to keep them? Throw a bunch of people in the middle of nowhere, wait a few years, and check back. They’ve either all died or formed a government. What am I misunderstanding, if anything?
To directly address the OP: One way to greatly improve the US Federal Government would be to add prison terms for things like jerrymandering or slipping unrelated expenditures into bills. Who defines “unrelated”? Ultimately, a jury of 12 regular people. If the congressperson is willing to take that risk, let them try. I’d like to see sentences range from 1 year (for petty but still deliberate acts) to 20 years for particularly heinous corruption and repeat offenders.
…apart from Singapore. :dubious:
Well, if pre-industrial examples count, the Inca Empire was a fairly successful benevolent state-socialist dictatorship. The god-emperor lived in only slightly greater comfort than his subjects. All produce was collected and distributed by government officials (who also arranged compulsory marriages for single people), and nobody in the empire went hungry or homeless. The degree of social and economic organization they managed to achieve is really amazing, considering this was a multinational empire and they had only stone-age technology to work with, no system of writing or information-encoding more versatile than the quipu, no draft animal larger than a llama, and a mountainous terrain impeding transportation and communication.
Of course, the habit of top-down rule was the empire’s Achilles heel. When the Spanish captured their emperor, the Peruvians were helpless; nobody knew what to do without the emperor to tell them.
I guess I’d like a cite that govts are poorly run and efficient compared to private business. i worked for a large, profitable corporation for 20 years and only one project I worked on ever shipped. Our campuses were spread all over hell and lots of money was spent flying between sites for useless meetings.
The US govt went to the moon in less than a decade yet GM can’t put out a hybrid car without buying the technology from Japan (where they have a great deal of govt industrial policy).
The overhead for Medicaid (or Medicare, can never get them straight) is much lower than private for-profit insurance. The “govt sucks” meme is tiresome and destructive. Let’s just make a decision on a case by case basis on whether a particular task is done better in the public or private domain.
The growth of the internet is a great example of public/private co-operation.
The travails of GM are sort of an example, though. By being inefficient, GM is losing market share to Toyota and Honda. The market is working as it should.
The U.S. government isn’t losing market share to more efficiently run governments. Businesses that are inefficient shrink or, if sufficiently inept, die; governments that are inefficient just go on hurting their citizens.
It is, sort of, depending on how you define the terms. It ( or other governments ) weakens it’s own power by harming it’s own reputation with incompetence or malice or untrustworthiness. Bad policy decisions like, say, refusing to institute national health care hurt the economy by driving away foreign investors who don’t want to carry the burden of providing their own health care, or of sick workers. And so on.
The problem as I see it is governments, largely being about territory, do have a certain “locked up customer base”, to continue the business analogy. It’s more like a monopoly than a competitive business. In order to overcome that, you’d pretty much have to eliminate the legal and practical limits on people moving and settling across national borders, which isn’t likely to happen.
Then I think you need to meet more Japanese. Bureaucratic incompetence has been all over the Japanese news recently. See here.
There is a much more fundamental reason why governments are inherently inefficient - lack of information. This is a big, big deal. Governments simply don’t have the ability to gather the information required to make efficient decisions. The economy is far too complex and dynamic for a central authority to maintain control of it.
Furthermore, even if they were really, really smart and had supercomputers and all kinds of other technology, they still wouldn’t have enough information required to govern efficiently - because the information isn’t known by anyone until the forces of the market uncover it.
For example, consider a case where the state allocates hammers as needed. How do they do that? Do you just apply for a hammer and get one? If so, what’s to stop everyone for applying for a hammer, just in case they need one? But there aren’t enough hammers for everyone, so some people who really need them don’t get them, and other people who don’t need them get lots.
Now imagine that your benevolent central manager begs people to please only ask for hammers if they really need them. And let’s further stipulate that the people are the model of communist selflessness, and are really trying to determine if they need a hammer. How do they know? Because the question is relative. The only way you can really know if you should be the one who needs a hammer the most is to know the needs of others, which you can’t see. So now you have to apply an absolute judgement - my hammer is getting old, it’s too small for the pictures I have to hang… does that mean I should get one? Sure, why not?
In the meantime, there’s a boot cobbler down the street going out of business because he lacks a hammer.
Another reason people can’t know - the value of a hammer only matters in respect to the value of the other things you have or can earn. But if there is no price on anything, even that bit of information remains hidden.
Now consider what happens under capitalism - someone makes a hammer, and offers it for sale. Two people want one, but one wants it more than the other and bids him out. Efficiency is retained - the person who needed it most got it. Also, the high vaue on the hammer stimulates people to make more hammers (and more steel to make the hammers, and more mining equipment needed to mine the ore to make the steel to make the hammer, and…) Prices transmit information about scarcity and demand precisely to those who need it, and the prices reflect the aggregate value that people place on items with respect to other items. Information is uncovered that would simply not be available any other way.
Here’s an excellent essay by Friedrich Hayek discussing information flow and the economy: The Use of Information in Society.
Information in a free economy bubbles up from the bottom and radiates through society. Changes in the supply and demand of myriad products are reflected back through the price system to the people who need to know. There is negative feedback - imbalances in supply and demand push the system back to equilibrium.
Central command is like balancing a pencil on your finger. Give the economy a push, observe what happens, Attempt to correct for the problems caused by the first push by pushing the other way. You wind up with an endless series of shortages and gluts, disincentives and wasted production. It’s an inevitable result of the nature of centralized command.
In theory, but this is rarely the case in real life for a number of reasons. There may ultimately be slightly more accountability, but it’s only because shareholders care about their money more than they care about government. The business and lives of elected officials is far more transparent to the average Joe, than that of a CEO at a public company. I can watch my congressman on C-SPAN, find out if he’s a closet homosexual, if he’s sleeping with his secretary, or if he did drugs as a teenager. Show me any CEO whose decisions and actions over the course of their entire life are under closer scrutiny than a high-ranking elected public official. Public companies don’t have journalists watching their employees or TV personalities interviewing their childhood friends. Few of the systems put in place to hold elected officials accountable exist in the private sector. Why do you feel they are under more scrutiny? A CEO who makes money could do damn near anything without getting fired. Do you think Bill Gates has to run his decisions by anyone, let alone have them voted on by a group of his peers? Does Steve Jobs need to lobby for voting support when he has a idea? Very rarely, if ever. Imagine if every first-class business flight, business lunch, or “massage” were scrutinized in the business community with the same fervor we scrutinize “earmarks” and other discretionary government spending. Don’t you think our idea of businesses being universally efficient would take a hit. governments seem more efficient because they are being more closely scrutinized.
What do you special interests are? They are groups of “people” with shared interests, asking for “things”. Do you really thing some congressman just dreams up an idea for a bridge or anything else like that? Someone with influence comes to them with the idea. It may be a wasteful, unnecessary project, but it is unfair to act as though our elected officials are solely responsible.
It’s basically the parable of the broken window. In this case, the government is the little boy, and the glazier is a special-interest group. It’s a system we all suffer for, but it exists because everyone thinks they might eventual be in the position of the glazier.
The reasons why the American government is inefficient in certain areas are as follows:
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Americans citizens have abandoned our stewardship over government. I think partly because of the divided responsibility doesn’t provide any one person with the incentive or the desire to hold people accountable, and because lobbying groups have made effective participation on an individual level more difficult.
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The government in involved in far more sectors, and has far more responsibility (and accountability) than any company. Any entity of a similar size would experience similar inefficiency. Governments are judged by an unfair rubric. Microsoft just has to make money (preferable more than last year/quarter). Imagine if they had to do that, make sure their employees were happy, that their employee’s kids were fed, clothed and educated, that they were safe during their commute, etc. If a company were responsible for all that, just making a lot of money wouldn’t be enough.
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There are built-in inefficiencies, redundancies, and overlap. They not only moderate the pace of change, but they also allow for more deliberation and consistency. Take the justice system. There are cases every year that have been heard by dozens of judges in several different courts. Think about how long it takes to execute a prisoner. In business, things like that happen far less. Other built-in inefficiencies include things like welfare (including corporate welfare), Medicare, tax cuts, etc.
Imagine a company deciding to cut the price of its product when they know their expenses were about to go up dramatically. We do that all the time when we run deficits with no plan to make up lost revenue in a reasonable way. Or the equivalent of a guy on death row; do companies decide to discontinue an unprofitable product, then decide to review that decision for a decade or so while continually losing money.