Detroit and AOL both suffered massive changes to their environments. AOL was bought in 2015 and no longer exists as a independent company. The Detroit city government has been failing for the last 50 years and is still a going concern. That is the point, if a corporation is incompetent they go out of business. Competent corporations grow and flourish, incompetent ones wither and die. If a government agency is incompetent nothing happens. Thus the average competency in corporations is higher than government.
Yeah, AOL goes out of business, and lays off its employees.
If detroit goes out of business, where do the people who live in detroit live?
I have an issue with the way my local school system runs. I voted in the last election, I emailed my board member, I spoke at the school board meeting. I told them that the change I wanted was supported by the CDC, the AMA, the APA, and the NEA, amongst many other similar organizations. So far this has produced jack squat. My options are to move my family away from all their friends and jobs or to keep paying thousands in taxes for an inferior product.
If there was Schools, Inc. and they had competition I could pick another school to give my thousands of dollars to.
This is a dubious definition of “amoral”. Corporations pursue strategies to maximize profit, which has been portrayed as a net positive (look how great our society has become by embracing the mantra greed is good). There seems to be a strong focus on short-term gains, though, ignoring long-term and broader effects, which seems like a net negative to me.
That is the point, Detroit can’t go out of business so it can’t be replaced by something better.
This is how evolution works. You take wolves and breed the friendliest ones, until you get a dog. Then breed the dogs who are best at herding sheep and you get a sheepdog. Which is better at herding sheep, sheepdogs or wolves? That is because one is the productive of competition and selection and the other one is not.
Then you need to talk to your neighbors and friends, and get them to agree with you. Just your vote alone doesn’t do anything, but it still does more than voting on a company in which you own little or no shares.
Basically, your community disagrees with you and your views.
You can choose another school to give your money to, you can send your kids to private school.
You can’t go to mcdonalds and demand they bring back the mcrib, either.
So, do what with the people who live in areas that you are claiming should be destroyed due to not being fit enough?
Besides, your example is flawed, in that wolves are better at being wolves than dogs are. Dogs are good at being dogs because of the influence that people have had over them, in forming them into what they are today. If you consider that to be a useful analogy for social issues, then you want a much much stronger govt than we have.
My take on it, very briefly put, is that conservatives support corporations over governments because conservatives are aligned with corporate interests and the interests of their wealthy owners, and from this perspective governments are seen as obstacles to corporate interests by regulating and taxing them. Liberals tend to be aligned with the interests of the people and tend to see government as a means of protecting and advancing the public interest.
That’s just silly. The truth of the matter is that all large bureaucracies tend to be horrendously inefficient and wasteful unless they happen to have exceptional leadership, which doesn’t happen often. If you think that there are consequences and disincentives against corporations being wasteful you haven’t done much studying of the internal workings of large corporations. Among the many things that happen routinely that is innate to bureaucracy is internal warfare and all its attendant costs; for instance, one executive fiefdom spending time and money to sabotage another fiefdom’s project, a project that might be costing the company millions.
The answer to your last paragraph is that if government muddles up someone’s paperwork probably nothing much will happen, just exactly like nothing much will happen if a company messes up one customer’s order. But if a company is chronically incompetent, it will probably go out of business, and if a government is chronically incompetent, it will probably be voted out of office.
That’s a very strange and bizarre way of looking at it, since the critical question is not whether the government of the day is indeed entitled to govern, but whether the people have a choice among parties and policies to choose the government they want. And in all true democracies among first-world nations, indeed they do, usually from among a vibrant set of competing parties. And in parliamentary systems they may also have the power to throw the government out early and substitute a different one if they don’t like it.
If governments are bad for consumers and corporations are good for them, then how come it was government that introduced social security and Medicare in the US and, in other countries, universal health care for all, while private corporations continue to literally kill people or drive them to bankruptcy by withholding health care or health care coverage whenever they can legally manage to do so?
This bullshit about guns and force is old and tired. You either have a nation of laws or you don’t. What do you think should happen if someone breaks the law and continues to escalate his defiance? The correct statement is not that “government is about force”, it’s that “government is about law and order and a peaceful and just society”; it’s the only institution that stands between us and anarchy.
No, we don’t have a voucher system in the US, so you are going to be giving your money to them no matter if you give more money to a private school or not. So there is no real choice.
Regards,
Shodan
That would be because your taxes are not going to pay for your child’s education. They going to pay for thousands of children, as are my taxes, my neighbor’s taxes, all of us. Extracting your contribution to all the children so that you can afford Montessori or whatever does not make logical sense to anyone but you.
That doesn’t contradict what I said. You can give your money to another school. No, you will not be able to stop paying money to your local community, just as I have to pay them even though I have no kids in the school. I also pay for senior services, MR/DD services, rehab services, fire service, and police services, even though I have not used any of those. I do occasionally visit one of the 7 parks that my taxes pay for.
But, if you don’t like the school, you do have options. You can send them to a private school. And, keep in mind, that the private school also gets subsidies from the public school system as well.
Really? Because it sounds like you are literally describing the definition of “amoral”. Pursuing profit while ignoring long-term and broader effects. Not “evil”, but indifferent.
Apples and oranges.
How do you separate the incompetence of Detroit’s government from the incompetence of the auto industry in Detroit?
Are the same people running Detroit as were running it 50 years ago? Were there the same laws?
A company in a no-win position can fire its customers by closing down product lines and going bankrupt. A city can’t fire its residents.
I wrote a column for our newspaper proposing that the school district increase average test scores and decrease overcrowding by firing the bottom 20% of the students.
Some people thought I was serious.
I must admit that the state took over Flint, remember, and decided to fix the problem by poisoning the residents under the guise of saving money. Perhaps that works for you.
The focus on short term gain is because the stockholders (for maybe a few microseconds) are more amoral than the board. They care about nothing except stock price.
But corporations don’t owe certain products to their customers. (They are obligated to not poison the environment.) Governments are more obligated to their citizens. That’s the basic difference, and why corporatism doesn’t work for government.
Then yes it does contradict what you said. You have to pay whether you use it or not.
Saying you have a choice on where to spend your money as long as you spend it there is contradictory.
Regards,
Shodan
You either don’t understand the analogy or don’t understand evolution or breeding. If there are two environments and one has competitive pressure and the other one does not. Then the environment that has competitive pressure will produce fitter animals. That is true whether it is applies to animals, people, or organizations. Governments do not have competitive pressure like corporations do and so they are less competent.
They have very little to do with each other. You don’t need an auto factory to have a government that provides a decent school system, provides a police force that protects its citizens, builds roads that work, and provides a decent business climate. On the contrary many places with lucrative businesses nearby seem to suffer a resource curse which degrades their local governments.
You should re-read what I wrote then, as you seem to have a hard time understanding. I only said that you can choose to give your money to another school. I said nothing about taking money out of the community into which you pay taxes.
Well, I do understand evolution and breeding, and I understood that you were making the analogy between taking wild animals and domesticating them to be similar to the difference between corporations and govts.
It’s not that I didn’t understand any of that, it’s just that it was a very poor analogy.
Evolution involves the death of the things that are not fit, and so requires mortality. Neither corporations nor govt are mortal, so it doesn’t fit there. There is no actual reproduction, no passing on of traits, no lineage or heritage. There is nothing at all, really, that connects them and validates your analogy.
Corporations have far less competitive pressure than you think they do. Small businesses, sure, but what competitive pressure is there for Windows or Comcast?
Also, by your logic, govts have not and cannot change. But that is the opposite of the reality that the government, from local to state and federal, is constantly changing, based on desires from the voters.
It’s a little hard to provides a decent school system, provides a police force that protects its citizens and builds roads that work if you don’t have healthy local industries to provide a tax base.
And conversely, it’s hard to attract industries if you don’t have a decent school system for workers, a police force that protects its citizens, roads that work and a healthy business climate.
Also the reason that Detroit is still a “going concern” and also the reason that most business leaders make poor politicians is that you can’t just “fire” the population of Detroit and liquidate its assets like you can with a failing business.
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The difference between businesses and governments is that, in general, businesses make processes better faster while governments are slow to change.
When I interact with government agencies, it is almost never pleasant. Shipping something from the post office is a minimum 30 minutes inside. FedEx takes about 5. Getting fingerprints done at a government office, 3.5 hours. At a fingerprint place, 15 minutes*. The DMV? Well, they finally instituted an online appointment system where you don’t have to be in the DMV to get in line. However, last time I was in there I still sat in the office for 45 minutes after being alerted by the system.
Governments do change, for example my local DMVs appointment system which is better than the old way. However, it still sucks and it took a very long time for the DMV to implement it. In general, businesses do things much faster.
Add in that many of the really bad government customer service experiences are required, not optional, and it is easy to see why some people aren’t fans of the government and believe it is wasteful.
I’ve worked for numerous corporations, some big some small. Some were wasteful and corrupt. Most, however, weren’t.
Slee