You have in this post confused and mixed a number of different things. Let’s start with 2: Government Policy and Executive Administration. It is certainly the case that governments decide on policies for reasons that are ‘earmarks’ , poorly thought out, or if you prefer ‘corrupt’. However the OP is not concerned with the quality of the decisions that are made, but with their execution, i.e. the administration of those decisions by the executive.
That is an altogether different debate, whether governments execute policies or deliver services more efficiently than private businesses would do so. I think the current thinking is that government business enterprises are a bad idea. That is private business is the best vehicle for operating an enterprise for profit.
Leaving that aside the more fertile question is whether a government program can deliver services more efficiently than private enterprise. The answer must depend to an extent on how you propose to measure efficiency.
To brass tacks, by most measures the delivery of health services in the US is markedly less efficient than single payer schemes administered by governments elsewhere. However, some regard the proper outcome of medical services as maximising the private sector income in providing those services. In that respect the US is nonpareil.
Education might be one example where the end user satisfaction is lower when the provider is a government. One factor which might be at the heart of these differences is the substantial efficiencies that follow from a single purchaser. In health and defence this works well. Whereas in education there are obviously fewer benefits gained by having a single purchaser. So that might be a way of testing the proposition in specific cases. Whether uniform and general standards at the purchase stage will create efficiencies.
Why are governments different in this regard. Aside from the scale of the problem, businesses face these things everyday. Consider two video game systems: The Wii and the Virtual-Boy. Same company, yet one bombed, and they can’t make enough of the other to satisfy demand. How is the position Nintendo is operating out of fundamentally different from the government’s? They are never sure whether they will have a warehouse full of systems, or whether they won’t be able to satisfy people’s needs.
Perhaps. But most people don’t just get things because they are “free” or are subsidized just to get them. There is a cost to such frivolity. In this case, carrying and storing a hammer you will never lose. For the same reason most people don’t aspire to go on welfare, go to the dentist everyday (in countries with universal health care), or ride the bus everywhere. There may be some cases where this is true, but it’s not always so black and white.
Why would nothing have a price? I’m not sure I’m understanding you. Even in your hammer analogy, there are presumably other hammers for sale (from other people), and taxes collected to pay for the gov’t hammers, right? Isn’t they value directly correlated to the value of similar goods and/or the taxes collected.
Well, the person who could afford it got it. This may be a semantics thing, but just cause you can afford something doesn’t mean you “need” it more. If they start selling organs, I don’t necessarily think the rich people that can afford them need them more.
You seem to be confusing ‘totalitarian Communism’ and ‘government’. The majority of the various governments don’t try to micromanage society down to the level of such things as who gets hammers and don’t, so your whole post misses the target.
And like it or not, governments are as efficient or more so at any number of things as private enterprise. Otherwise, for example, we’d have an all-mercenary army. And all the studies I’ve heard of show that our free market focused health care system is less efficient and for most people less effective than the evil, evil government run versions. And so forth. The free market is a tool, and there’s no such thing as a universal tool. It is no more always the best solution than government is always the best solution.
We have a benevolent dictatorship. It works ok, but the local culture tends to be reactionary rather then really planning ahead. Certainly getting gov’t things done here is more efficient than in Central/Eastern Europe.
The Federal government cannot be made more efficient. It will eventually bloat to the point where no actual services are rendered and it will then collapse. This is more or less the history of every such structure that has not been collapsed externally.
The reason is that government structure is self-perpetuating in terms of budgets and employees. Once a given structure is created, the structure itself is impossible to eliminate. If it does a poor job of doing its original mission, a new structure is created which is in addition to, but not in place of, the original structure. The only incentive is to spend your entire budget in order that you may ask for a larger one next year.
If budgets are cut externally, the structure cuts services before structure. Cuts in those services create incentive for the recipients to demand restoration of the budget and prevent cutting that structure out of the budget. So for instance if there were an Office of Keeping Bridges Under Repair that had $10M dollars of which only $2M was actually repairing bridges and their budget was reduced, you can be sure even less than $2M will go to repairing bridges, hollering will begin, and the budget restored.
For elected officials, there is absolutely no chance they can cut the Federal Budget. Our electorate has long since abandoned the notion that they should seek what they can do for their country. The question has become: How can I best get my share–more than my share if possible? Since we can vote ourselves services from the public coffer, and since we have allowed the government to borrow from the future, we will elect only representatives who are willing to do that.
The proper solution is to have a Federal budget which allocates a percentage of total tax revenue to each area rather than a dollar amount. It is way too late to put that structure in place.
We are living in a house of cards and the wind is blowing.
The example of the Government of the United States of America is certainly one that counters the OP’s contention.
In a bare two and a quarter centuries it has gone from an essentially unfunded and powerless advisory group, deliberately limited by its creators from any meaningful authority over its member governments, to an independent self directed civil and military power, able to enforce its whims both inside and outside of its borders.
Now, that may be many things, but it is not a “poorly run organization.” Government is the ultimate weapon, and its first priority is its own survival. In assuring their own survival, governments must first consolidate authority, then increase both the scope, and the size of their powers. Our government has been very successful in this regard. Efficiency is a measure of the relationship of effort required to results achieved. Confusing efficiency with a measure of benefits created in some way is delusional. That has never been the purpose of any government, merely the fuel it must obtain to gain its power. Even then the perception of benefit is the only really essential element, actual benefit is not even particularly desirable, since it requires far greater, and more sustained effort. Perception is much easier to obtain, and can be sustained thereafter with almost no effort aside from rhetoric.
Governments are chaotic and disorganized because they’re answerable to millions of people who all have different opinions about what they want their government to do.
“Poorly run” is not so easy to define. The government often has a monopoly on the activities relegated to it, and we allow that because there are some things that need to be a monopoly-- like the police force. It would be very difficult to have a civil society with a bunch of private militias out there keeping order for whatever faction that happened to pay them. Witness Iraq.
But monopolies lack competition, and so they tend to be slow to change and often slow to respond to the needs of the customers. People can leave the country if they are really dissatisfied, but that’s a pretty drastic step to take. To a certain extent we just have to recognize that the government isn’t going to be as efficient as, say, WalMart, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it should give us pause as to exactly which functions we want to turn over to the government. It should also give us pause as to how to allocate certain governmental functions between the federal, state, and local level. The more removed the function is from the people it is supposed to serve, the less likely it is going to be properly responsive to those people.
Governments are very different from large businesses in several key ways:
-Size - As someone already mentioned, governments operate on a scale orders of magnitude larger than the largest businesses.
-Unlike a business, the government is a closed system - The government cannot selectively govern the population. Businesses can pick and choose which markets they wish to service. For example, a private school is a business. They can be selective about which students they want to educate. They don’t need to concern themselves with students who aren’t their customers. The government needs to work out how it’s going to educate all it’s citizens or it will need to work out the consequences of not doing so.
-Authority - By definition, the government is the law of the land. In spite of what some people might think, a business still has to answer to the laws of the environment in which it operates. The government can define it’s own environment and therefore needs checks and balances to avoid abuses.
Mrs. Cake has the right of it. Governments aren’t any different from businesses in how they operate. We all have stories about terrible service at various businesses or wastefulness and excess. The difference is that businesses operate under natural selection. Those that are too wasteful (without producing anything to offset this) go under. Governments don’t, unless they fall to revolution or something. There is a lot more wiggle room for them.
Sam Stone ignores the role of elections when he says that businesses must justify their decisions but not so governments. People get thrown out of office all the time for making stupid decisions. In the case of bureaucrats, like, say, Heck-of-a-Job-Brownie, they get thrown out by those who are accountable to the voters.
In sum, I disagree with the assertion that governments are intrinsically poorly run. That said, can greater efficiency be achieved? Probably, though I’m uncertain how.
…both are inefficient, because the lack of competition means there is no check on their actions. take education: the eductaion monopoly equates new schools with high-quality education. That is why we spend billions on new schools, yet the actual quality of the education provided continually declines. And it helps that the construction lobby likes contracts for new schools.
Originally Posted by Chief Pedant:
It will eventually bloat to the point where no actual services are rendered and it will then collapse. This is more or less the history of every such structure that has not been collapsed externally.
Would you accept the Soviet Union as the most recent spectacular internal collapse of an inefficient government unable to deliver services?
I don’t want to hijack the OP for a snide editorial comment I made, but given the history of civilization, the long-term survival of political governments is unusual. While the proximate reason is often external, the internal reasons that led to them being weak enough to be collapsible are, in my opinion, related to the inevitable tendency of bureaucracies to bloat and decay from their original mission.
So as not to hijack the thread, I’ll leave any follow-up comments you make alone. To the point of whether it will happen to the US, let’s pick it up again in 25 years.
Since the Soviet Union is a tool that the Right likes to beat people over the head with while screaming “GOVERNMENT BAD ! BAD !”, no I won’t. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was Communist, and overambitious. It doesn’t demonstrate some inevitable tendency of governments to collapse, which is why so many governments outlasted it.
You are making the same error Sam Stone did, deliberately or otherwise. You are pretending that “government” and “totalitarian Communism”, in this case the USSR, are the same thing.
A line item veto so that a Bill which is acceptable overall could not be used as a cover for private interests.
Plain language for items buried in bills. This sort of shenanigan, done for the PGA Tour in this case:
*"On page 598 of the 650-page bill, at the end of a section designed to limit the use of corporate “deferred compensation” plans, is an exemption for any plan “established or maintained by an organization incorporated on July 2, 1974.” * (The PGA Tour was, of course, the only organization meeting that criterion, and it stands as the single most egregious example of treating pensions for the wealthy differently.) The least expectation is to simply name “The PGA Tour” and let it stand out for the special treatment it got.
No earmarks. None.
Budgets are a percentage of tax revenue, not a fixed dollar amount
Move toward making it the Federal Government’s job to redistribute money, but the local government’s job to oversee it. If West Virginia’s school system gets $100M in Federal money, it should be WV’s job to decide how to spend it.
Unless money needs to be redistributed, leave the Feds out of it altogether. For example, the only money the Feds control for schools is money that’s being redistributed from rich states to poorer ones, and the federal structure is a minimalist pass-through structure.
Stop pulling my chain, DT. My New Year’s gift to you is leaving your smug comment (mostly) alone. Happy New Year
Wow, this is an amazingly naive statement. If the results of a decision result in a disaster, then, maybe, the CEO will get fired. Most decisions in a company are made at lower levels, and stockholders never see them. I assume you own stock - has a company ever run its decision by you? If you owned 10% or more of a company, then maybe. But there are plenty of CEOs out there, with tame boards, who are basically immune from stockholders except in extreme cases. Why do you think that a CEO getting fired, like Merrill Lynch, makes headlines? And again, that was due to poor results.
We’ve discovered that balanced budgets are not necessarily good things. You’re talking at the very highest level, lets talk about at the lower levels. I travel for my company, but for grant reviews I travel for the US government. I don’t see much of a difference. I know government per diem requirements are much stricter than my company’s requirements. I used to deal with Sandia when it was run by Bell Labs under government regulations when I was working for Bell Labs. We were a lot freer to spend money than they were. I’ve also know old timers in industry who were far from stingy with company money.
The only place where government is wasteful that I see is that it can’t carry over money, or make a profit, so there is an incentive to spend your budget. But if the purpose is to help people or get a job done, that might be good.
So, the possibility of a politician losing his job in an election every two or four or six years is less of an incentive to be efficient than a CEO who is pretty much set for life assuming he doesn’t screw up?
If you think there is no corruption or inefficiency in business, you must never have gone near a big company. Remember the bubble, where businesses spent like drunken sailors? Governments (usually state or local) under budget crunches are very efficient. Less so when you print money, I agree, but that is a very specific case.