People play apples and oranges when they compare government and big business. They focus on the success stories of the business world and ignore the failures. Those who talk up corporate competence need to remember that the same big business world that produced Microsoft, Sony, and WalMart also produced Enron, WorldCom, and Kmart. Big business can be just as poorly run and disorganized as government.
That’s true for the winner in the marketplace. How about the losers? The company who spends millions, tens of millions, on products which never get to market or bomb when released. I worked on a big project for a very successful company which spent probably a billion bucks on a design which has never come anywhere close to recouping its investment.
Bingo. In my town, there is a constant stream of letters to the paper bemoaning the high salaries of the top execs of a town of over 100,000 people with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars - where their salary isn’t that much greater than mine as an aging engineer in private enterprise. I know a guy who was a very high government official in New Jersey. The moment the administration changed, and he was out of a job, his salary skyrocketed. I think just about every ditch digger and McDonalds cook thinks that the mayor shouldn’t really make more than he does.
There is waste everywhere, but waste in business gets dealt with by new rules, without any advantage from publicizing it. People who publicize waste in a company get canned, those who do it in government get press and get elected.
Except that it won’t be your say; it will be the Federal Government’s say. They will spend two dollars creating studies and commissions to create rules, and another two dollars for organizing structures to distribute and oversee the money according to the rules. And the money that gets to a West Virginia school child will be a dollar (figuratively speaking). Not to mention that the Federal government has no earthly idea how Podunk school in Timbuktu WV actually needs their money spent.
And I’m sure we could trace a similar train of wasted dollars through and project in the corporate world. George Bush might not be a great CEO but at least we’re not paying him $100,000,000 a year.
I’ve never understood this. Why are state governments good and federal government bad? Why should we assume that the government in Charleston, WV knows more than the one in Washington, DC? The West Virginia government is presumedly run by the best politicians from a pool of 1,808,344 people. The United States government is presumedly run by the best politicians from a pool of 303,096,000 people. The odds are that the average federal politician probably does know more than average West Virginian (or Californian or Texan or New Yorker) politician. And they’re even higher that they know more than whoever’s in charge of Timbuktu.
I’m sure some State governments are worse than the Federal one, and some local governments are worse yet.
The question at hand is efficiency and not collective wisdom, although there is no guarantee that a larger pool of decision-makers is wiser than one smart guy (see Stranger’s “benevolent dictator” short answer.
I opt for local control of locally-spent money. Large central planning sounds great in principle and craps out in practice. (I am very tempted to bring up the Soviet Union again, but I sorta promised Der Trihs…)
For a Federal government to figure out what Timbuktu school really needs, they gotta come to Timbuktu and study it. Then they have to come up with a plan for, distribute the money from that plan (with oversight to make sure it’s being spent per the plan) then come back to Timbuktu and see how it’s working out, then come up with a new iteration, then…well, you get the idea.
I say it’s Timbuktu’s school and they should decide how to spend the money. The only money the Feds should be sending them is money DanBlather had left over b/c he is richer, and the only role of the Feds should be making Dan cough up his excess to the paupers in Timbuktu.
So if it’s where to build a bridge across Joe-Bob’s crik: local control.
If it’s Interstate 64: Federal control.
I don’t think state governments are any better that the federal government, nor is the average local politician better than the average national politician. But, I would argue that the West Virginia politician knows better about what West Virginia school children need that the national body at large.
And conversely, the school board of Timbuktu County would know more about its own county’s needs than the state government. And the Principal of Timbuktu High School would know more than the county board of education, and the teacher in the classroom would know more than the principal.
That’s not saying that you couldn’t have a real douchebag in charge at the local level to muck up the process, but if we try to get quality people at each level, then we would get the teacher saying “I need a new chalkboard” and the money would get spent on a chalkboard instead of travel, studies, commissions, middle management salaries and the like…
And I agree with another poster. I don’t think education should at the federal level at all. The GOP used to be for the abolish of the Department of Education, now under Bush funding has doubled…
It’s offtopic to this thread but it’s a porkbarrel. The majority of private schools in this country are run by conservative religious groups and Bush is using the Department of Education to funnel tax money to the religious conservatives who have supported his campaigns.
But whatever Timbucktu figures out is only going to be applied in Timbucktu. There are a lot of universal ideas that would apply to most school systems. It makes more economic sense to have one central place taking the lead in education and distributing its ideas to public schools throughout the country than it does to hope that each public school will develop its own ideas independently.
If Timbucktu spends a million tax dollars developing a new program, it’ll benefit 100 students. If Charleston spends a million tax dollars developing a new program, it’ll benefit 10,000 students. If Washington spends a million tax dollars developing a new program, it’ll benefit 1,000,000 students.
People talk about how efficient large corporations are. This is the way they work. They develop a good plan, apply it nation wide, and reap the benefits of economics of scale. Timbuktu High is the Mom and Pop corner store and the Department of Education is WalMart.
DB … I missed your answer to my question in Post #25
No, that one we finished (had to). The others were just your standard Dilbert SNAFUs.
Well since we live in a Democracy having the Federal govt oversee it is me having a say. You keep making assertions about inefficiency and I have yet to see facts to back it up. The failure of “central planning” is a red-herring. I don’t think anyone is advocating that the Federal govt should decide how many hammers should be produced a year.
This meme that the Federal govt doesn’t know local community’s needs can be carried further. Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts are more alike than Portland and eastern Oregon; maybe we shouldn’t have state govt. Poor people in Boston and eastern Oregon are more alike than a rich person and a poor person in Portland; maybe we shouldn’t have city govt.
In reality, some things are done more efficiently centrally and others are done better locally. Having a rigid political bias that big govt is bad gets in the way of making a wise decision on which is which.
If you need a cite for facts to back up the notion of Federal Government inefficiency, I fear we’re too far apart for much useful discussion. I think the OP assumes that inefficiency is a given.
How’s that Federal War on Poverty coming along, by the way, for the 18-64 y/o working class group?
All due respect, but if you’re going to take it as a given that governments are inefficient, then you really shouldn’t post in a thread in Great Debates about whether governments are inefficient.
On most modern bicycles rotating the pedals in reverse has no effect, regardless of how fast you do it.
Did you read the cite I posted? It describes a very fundamental reason why governments are inefficient - and it applies to any governmental intervention, not just micro-management.
And besides that, anyone who observes the process of decision-making in government should see how wildly inefficient and inaccurate it is. Politicians vote on bills they haven’t even read. Multi-million dollar expenditures get added and removed on whim, or by backroom political wrangling in committees. Politicians insert earmarks that force agencies to take on projects they don’t want, which have no budget, and which make no sense with respect to their larger missions.
The process of allocating which federal funds go where is haphazard at best. It is rarely based on absolute need, but rather the expedient needs of political bargaining. Senators on powerful committees divert more funds to their own states, regardless of whether the states need the funds or not. Check out the distribution of Homeland Security funding, and see if it makes a whole lot of sense from an economic efficiency standpoint.
Government bureaucrats make regulatory decisions on industries they barely understand. They pass laws that are virtually impossible to implement. Check out the history of HDTV regulations, for example.
Agencies are impossible to kill. The Rural Electrification Administration was formed to oversee the expansion of the electrical grid to rural areas. 70 years after almost all rural areas have been fully electrified, the agency continued to exist with a budget larger than ever.
NASA’s space flight control is located in Texas, while the rockets are fired from Florida. Why? Not because it made economic sense to do so, but because a powerful Texas politician had to be appeased to get funding.
AmTrack has a history of failure, huge budget overruns, and poor allocation of train routes.
The vagaries of politics cause huge amounts of waste as projects get funded by one administration then defunded by the next based on political infighting or differing ‘visions’ of where the country should be. The Superconducting Supercollider spent billions and was cancelled. NASA’s history of cost overruns and delays is largely the result of budgets that fluctuate haphazardly as different administrations come and go. The International Space Station had to be redesigned multiple times as its budget changed. So did the Space Shuttle.
Other countries are no better. Look into the history of MITI in Japan, and what a colossal failure it was. Look at the British National Health Service.
What the Hayek paper points out is that typical government failures are not just the failures of men and women - they are intrinsic to the nature of the system. Every time a liberal comes to power, he or she claims that this time it will be different - that the new kids on the block are smarter than all the ones before who tried and failed. And they’re always wrong.
That’s a worthless cite, it’s just an opinion piece with no facts. As another posted mentioned, Walmart does an incredible job of using information. They get real time data from their stores and use it to move merchandise among them. They also adjust prices constantly in response to demand.
I own and run a retail store and their is no way we are as “efficient” as Walmart. I have to make decisions months ahead of time in anticipation of what sales will be. We make up for it with service, a quality environment, etc.
What bothers me is working backward from the conclusions; i.e., govt is bad, let’s figure out why. I see NASA as an incredible success, you see different, so please show me how long and at what cost private business landed on the moon or put a telescope in space.
Of course the federal government has some inefficiency. State governments have inefficiency. Local governments have inefficiency. Big businesses have inefficiency. Small businesses have inefficiency. Individuals have inefficiency. Everything has some degree of inefficiency.
But can you show that the federal government has a higher degree of inefficiency than any credible alternative?
But you haven’t explained why government suffers from this lack of information while private businesses don’t.
It’s funny you mention efficiency while decrying the fact that politicians don’t read entire bills. If they read every bill they voted on, nothing would ever get done. You are trying to imply that they have no idea what they are voting for, and that is false in the overwhelming majority of cases. Legislative deliberation is a built-in “inefficiency” in order to moderate change and promote more thoughtful decision making. How can that be made more efficient without allowing for more risk in the form of fallout from capricious decision making?
Says you. How about some examples of these earmarks that force agencies to take on projects they don’t want and have no budget for. As noted before the US Government is enormous. A million-dollar earmark is a drop in the bucket in most cases. Smaller entities do it all the time, it’s just a matter of scale. Again, this is not something unique to government.
You don’t think analogous things happen in big companies? You don’t think the XBox people over at Microsoft don’t lobby for more money at the expense of the Vista programmers? “Absolute need” is in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure you don’t “need” many of the things your job provides you (ie. comfortable chair, nice pens, flat panel monitors, etc.), but somebody sure as hell lobbied for them. Just because something has been poorly executed doesn’t mean the whole system is inefficient.
And the whole point of being a representative is that you don’t need to be an expert on everything. Who among us could fulfill that requirement? They can hire people to study the issue for them, listen to constituents, listen to lobbying groups, etc. What are you talking about specifically with regard to HDTV regulation?
The Interstate Commerce Commission in one agency that has been killed. And it’s a crowded graveyard. In addition, many are consolidated.
If you had bothered to the minimum amount of research, you would see that a similar agency is still doing necessary work. Keep in mind that the REA is now the Rural Utilities Service (RUS). RUS is charged with providing public utilities (electricity, telephone, water, sewer) to rural areas through public-private partnerships. It is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So there is another example of an agency that has been consolidated. And since the REA doesn’t really exist anymore, there budget is in fact not bigger than ever. Cite
Pretty efficient huh. So the REA succeeded in its stated goal, then was “killed”. Where is the problem again? I assume you are going to retract the previous statement which is demonstrably false:
Where does he say that? The word “government” doesn’t appear in the entire link. Where is there anything about the intrinsic nature of the government? It’s possible I missed it, but I think you are trying to apply the argument to situations the author did not intend it to apply to.
Nice partisan jab.
I got’s me a Master of Public Administration degree, I does, so that makes me as much an expert as anyone, right? No, really, we sort of studied this whole thing in school. Well, at any rate, I got out with a few insights for sharing.
Unlike commerical business, where the bottom line is a pretty reliable measure of “success”, there simply is no single measure of success for any government program. Fiscal efficiency is one measure of success - only one. Fiscal efficiency only partly comes into play when a local government decides whether to run its own police and fire departments, or join in with other locals in a regional cooperative. Other things go into such a decision, such as the desire for local control, local pride, and how well the local gummints get along with each other.
Fiscal efficiency plays only a part of such things as public works. In California, public agencies award construction contracts by competitive bidding. But low bid is only one requirement for a contractor to get the contract: in California (and for federal highway projects) the contractor is required to pay “Prevailing Wages”, and often there are often requirements to subcontract to “disadvantaged businesses.” On the larger contracts, there will also be requirements for training programs and what-have-you. That is, your public works contract is not only being used to get a road built, but also to improve employment conditions, establish social justice, and other things.
That these things should be included in government contracts is certainly debateable, but the current political consensus is that these are good things, and worth it.
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As I see it, American government is through more or less run by consensus and compromise. By whom is a tricky and shifting thing, but it still takes time - and money - to achieve those things. I think we could save a few bucks here and there, maybe, but on the whole, we could only save a significant amount of money if we all agreed just how to do so. I don’t see it happening.
Ah yes, the dreaded NHS. Imagine if the US had managed to replicate that disaster perfectly. It would have (admittedly somewhat rough-around-the-edges) universal largely-free healthcare for roughly the same amount that is now spent by the government on Medicare and Medicaid. The horror!