Generalization alert! Americans do not like government, so they prevent the government from doing anything that might generate revenue and offset the costs involved in governing, and thus they can claim that government is wasteful and inefficient and a drain on the economy.
Perce
That's not really the operating premise of the government. In the US it generally thought that the private sector can and does usually do a better job of many things. That's because the private sector is incentivized to do a better job or go out of business. The government is not supposed to compete with the private sector. The givernment is supposed to regulate and handle things that we don't think can equitably serve the public from the private sector. Mail, social security, things like that where the private sector has no incentive to service sections of the population that would be unprofitable.
Health care is one of those areas that has become a controvesial issue but bassically is the same problem. There is a segment of the population that there is just no way to profitably provide health care to. Does that segment of the population deserve health care? If you say they do not deserve health care then you need to repeal the law that says when they show up at the emergeny room they have to be treated. Let them die on the curb. If you say they do deserve health care then you need a way to pay for it.
Americans speak out of both sides of their mouth. They don't want the government involved in anything until they think someone has treated them or someone they know unfairly then the first thing they want to know is why didn't the government do something about it. This whole deficit is that same problem. Americans want the government to spend less but don't cut anything that affects them. Americans have an unrealstic expectation of government these days. It's gotten us into a mess.
There is virtually NOTHING that a government - any government - can do that can't be done better by private enterprise.
"What about police protection!" you may claim. In my city, there are probably ten times the number of private security guards as there are police (not to mention an armed citizenry).
"Well, well... there's the fire department!" In the United States, 85% of the firefighters are volunteers.
"Ah, ha! Surely you wouldn't dismiss the military!" Throughout history, many wars were fought by mercenaries. If you need a war, you hired an army.
All of the above are certainly extreme, but we have ample examples of private enterprise working WITH the government. In my town, the city contracts with a private trash collector. The private trash collector descended with a fleet of automated trucks and provided each resident with a special trash can (instead of the former requirement of bags and before that privately owned cans). The result is a SUBSTANTIAL improvement - for the homeowner - regarding garbage collection.
On a more national level, virtually all building codes mandate UL-certified stuff, but Underwriter's Laboratories is a private company. Contrast that cooperation combination with government-only testing and regulation as in the FDA or the EPA. Most government regulatory bodies could f*ck up a wet dream.
So perhaps the PD is understaffed.
Yes, and I have read that the Byzantine Empire, *realizing that Christians could not be asked to fight*, used mercenaries.
A nearby city has ten private trash pickup services competing with each other, so many streets (maybe not all, because certain streets may have no customers of a particular service) have ten different trucks driving along, chewing up the roads, and each bypassing several homes. How can that be efficient and economical? But when the city council proposed letting a contract to a single service, people screamed about having their freedom of choice taken away; the proposal has now been dropped.
There is another model for the relationship between government and private enterprise. For decades both the Commonwealth (national/federal) and many state governments in Australia (no matter whether they were conservative or "liberal" -- as Americans use the term) had enterprises in competition with private enterprise"; e.g., The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, The Savings Bank of South Australia (and similar in some other states), various State Government Insurance Offices. None of these, AFAIK, operated like a traditional government department: I think they were run by boards of directors/governors. I understand that some of those enterprises were privatized on philosophical grounds, but at least in one case people, especially in rural areas, have been disadvantaged: every Post Office (which in a small community might be just a few feet of counter space in the General Store, or wherever) was an agency for the Commonwealth Savings Bank, so almost everyone had reasonably easy access to banking facilities. Since privatization, any individual bank office that did not show a profit was closed, leaving many people without convenient banking facilities.
One of the problems with the US regulatory bodies is that there is a revolving door between those bodies and the industries they are supposed to be regulating. In the traditional British-style Civil Service nobody gets into a high-ranking position from "outside": seniority plays a big part.
Perce
I had a full height external hard drive that was larger than a loaf of bread and it was as heavy as a cinder block. (2 - 5.25 bays high and over a foot long) It cost 600 bucks
I now have USB flash drive that can store 1000 times more data and the size/weight of a pack of gum. It cost 20 bucks
having been a temp mailman I can tell you it would not work. There is no way I could have delivered two days worth of mail in one day. I couldnt even get it all on the truck at once. I do think that those who want home delivery should pay a premium for it. Two apartment complexes both about the same size. One had all the mail boxes at the office the other had the mailboxes at each apartment. One took about
20 minutes to deliver the mail to the other about two hours. I havent delivered a letter in 40 years but I still think those that make it more difficult should have to pay more for the service.
We have an identical system in the U.S. It's called the educational establishment.
Heh!
We used to have a personable mailman; often stopped to chat. I asked him about that and he said he didn't walk the route as it was laid out by the postal service and local postmaster. He walked it the way HE wanted to walk it. As a consequence, he finished his route, usually, by 1:00 p.m. Then had lunch. Then read his text books until time to go back to the barn.
"What are you studying?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm going to law school at night. I hope to be a lawyer for the U.S. Postal Service so I'll never have to work again."
I get the impression that you think that is bad. Tenure has been discussed many times in our papers the over the past few weeks, and the position that makes most sense to me is that tenure was never intended to protect incompetence, but administrators often can't be bothered to do what is necessary to get rid of incompetent teachers or to help them to improve.
Anyway, I did not say that promotion in a British-style Civil Service is
*entirely* on the basis of seniority: I said it plays a big part.Another thing just occurs to me: if you have a regulatory body that is greatly staffed by people from the industry they are supposed to be regulating, isn't it possible that they will introduce regulations that their buddies can live with but will drive their competitors out of business?
Perce
Unions can certainly be a good thing but they can also protect incompetent workers. Often administrators have there hands tied. There was an investigative TV program on a few years ago which focused on the NYC school system. The process flow chart for firing a teacher is 5 feet long. It is so difficult that they maintain a school without students in Brooklyn and simply assign the "teachers" there at full pay and benefits.
Tenure originated as a system of job security in universities, not elementary and high schools where it didn't fulfill it's role of protecting the professor researching something not conforming to the accepted wisdom (Wikipedia talks about other than "string theory" in physics) or speaking out on controversial subjects. School teachers don't do research and should be doing what they're told as far as controversy is concerned so they and we don't need it. Tenure reminds me of health care benefits for auto workers: easy to promise but very costly to deliver.
As to incompetent teachers, they can't improve; either they're stupid or they have the wrong personality to teach kids but they can't leave because they can't get the same pay in any other job. Naturally "there but for the grace of god go I" applies to the people in charge hence lifetime employment for the hopeless. This BTW is true in any bureaucracy or corpocracy although it may not be quite as blatant and at a low level is perhaps not quite as bad as it seems. Putting people into a position of constant stress, leaping tall buildings with a single bound every day and every minute, results in burnout, lack of loyalty, and lack of innovation--they just get a CYA mentality.
No argument that tenure is often abused, but teachers do need some protection even at k-12 level. All it takes is some rich kid's parent whining to school board that their little darling is being picked on, or some vindictive kid making fake charges of sexual abuse, and small-town school boards would be quick to throw the teacher under the bus. It hasn't been that many decades since they routinely had 'morals' clauses in employment contracts, and female teachers were presumed to have resigned if they got married, lest they leave in the middle of the term due to pregnancy. IOW, they were considered little more than glorified nannies.
Heck even the big city schools are tossing any teacher, tenure or otherwise, under the bus at the first suggestion of sexual abuse. The risks, both legal and trying to convince the local media (maybe ESPECIALLY the local media) is just too great to do otherwise.
It
Tenure have any more protection than the employment contracts.
You're at it again. There are a substantial number of "lifers" I know that said the Iraq war got out of hand because of ill-trained contractors, specifically the idjits that got themselves hanged from a bridge in Fallujah
Oh yeah, I really want to be policed by "lowest bid" rent-a-cops with little or no training in the use of deadly force who were flipping burgers a week before they pinned on the badge. No thanks. Weren't you once a sheriff, a paid government police agent? Wasn't it you, the Yaminator, who was just recently telling us how crappy rent-a-cops are? Now you're singing a different tune, it seems, to fit a pointless point that "anarchy is good for us."
Anyone who's ever run an all-volunteer organization will tell you it's like herding cats. If you can't control their paychecks, you can't control them. It's that simple. It's important to note those paid 15% work in most large cities where the risk that one fire will burn down many houses. Experience has taught those city officials that they need to always have paid firefighting staff around that's well-trained and well-equipped because the risk is so much greater than in rural areas.
The Brits hired the Hessians to help fight the Revolutionary War.
Mercs didn't work for the English or the Romans, and it doesn't look like they are working so well for us, either. But historical facts don't seem to deter you from arguing the point as if it had an iota of merit.
In my area, the government did exactly the same thing (cans/automated trucks) and it all works quite nicely. In some states, privatized trash collection is a mainstay of organized crime and a source of a serious amounts of illegal dumping. Why pay the waste station transfer fees if you can dump the stuff somewhere for free? Privitization invites as many problems as it pretends to solve.
"In the New York area alone, members of the five major mob families have been convicted or are facing trials not just for labor racketeering and extortion but also for criminal infiltration of such businesses as restaurants, food distribution, entertainment, waterfront cargo handling, vending machines, liquor, securities, garbage and toxic-waste disposal, and the trucking, jewelry, garment, construction and real-estate industries." - Ronald Reagan
Do you run a fruit store on the side? I ask because you're always mixing apples, oranges and kumquats in the same bowl. The FDA system isn't perfect because Republicans are always seeking to defang it in order to protect the big agribusiness owners in their home states. Contrary to popular belief, most inspections are NOT done by the Feds, but by private companies. The same companies that gave us poisoned peanut butter, salmonella laced-eggs, E-coli infested hamburgers and more. The FDA was given greater power than the 1906 Food and Drug Act provided because the private business that you believe can handle everything as well as the government poisoned over 100 people in the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy.
There's great support for enlarging the power of the FDA in the wake of the recent wide-scale food poisonings but Republican opposition will likely last until Big Business kills another 100 people. As you can see, it's the failure of business to regulate itself that INVITES government oversight.
Businesses have proven time and time again (most recently BP in the Gulf) that they can NOT and WILL NOT regulate themselves. It's why we license doctors, lawyers and other professionals - to assure the public that they are capable of performing their complex tasks and to punish them if they fail.
Anyone who wants to imagine what an entirely "privatized" world would look like needs only study the early history of Chicago, a town built with virtually no government "interference." Chicago eventually burned to the ground because of a lack of planning, a lack of building codes that allowed too many wooden buildings and sidewalks placed too close together and a lack of appropriate fire-fighting equipment. And no, it was not a cow that started it. That was the cover story put out to conceal the true underlying causes and it's been thoroughly debunked.
Working with local Tammany Hall officials such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration, who had witnessed the fire from the street below, pushed for comprehensive safety and workers' compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond. As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded soon after in New York City, October 14, 1911."
Repeated failures of business to behave have brought on precisely the government you appear to so deeply detest. Remove government and we'll just have more of what we had before - callous disregard for anything except profits. It's clear that profits, not human lives, were what the owners of the shirtwaist factory were considering when they locked the only fire exits. As Chris Rock once noted, if it were not for the minimum wage law, employers would try to pay people in used Popsicle sticks.
You may hate the government (which, as far as I can tell, paid you a salary for at least a part of your working life) but I'm glad that it's protecting workers from big business, who would treat them as a lump of coal to be consumed and discarded without regulations to the contrary.
-- Bobby G.
There's also the problem of monopoly businesses. If there's no competition, the principles of the free market just don't work very well. Look at your ever-rising cable bill to see that process in operation. We even see that just two or three competitors don't really qualify as real competition because it's too easy for them to collude on prices. Look at insurance - often you don't know what you've been paying for until you're deathly ill and they deny you coverage. Many people would have been better off with no insurance - if they had been able to save and not spend the premium dollars. I've been through it twice. The last thing in the world a sick person should have to add to their list of troubles is a war with a faceless health insurance bureacracy.
In the '30's it was necessary for the government to make the push to make phone and electrical lines reach to the part of the population where it wasn't "profitable" for business to reach. Why? To keep two different Americas from forming within our borders, for one thing. We're seeing a similar problem with the Internet. People who don't have it, or have only dialup, are at a distinct disadvantage over those that do and unlike phone or electric lines, you don't just install it and turn on a light or talk, there's an intellectual divide forming like we've never seen before. A country with one civil war in its history has to work extra hard to make sure those sorts of deep sociological divisions never happen again.
We pride ourselves on being the greatest nation on earth. Yet we've got health care and education ratings that aren't really very good compared to the rest of the world and the reasons for that are not being addressed correctly. I have friends in Australia that think our way of doing things is downright dumb, and I tend to agree. As you point out, we're paying for indigent health care already, and in the worst way possible - as high cost emergency care.
Certainly there's a danger in giving something to someone who has not contributed their fair share in creating it. Giving unemployment checks and letting people sit at home is insane. Give them money to retrain, to look for work, to clean public parks, to do something that gets them out of the house and used to the idea of going to work every day.
Study after study has shown the longer people are out of work, the less likely they will ever go back to work. If they want that check badly enough, they'll clean up litter or use the time to interview for jobs that are more suited to their skills. Disability claims have doubled since the collapse because that system is in total disarray and also *should* be improved, and perhaps parts of it privatized with the government just acting as an "honest broker." Now it seems that people who actually qualify but were working anyway until the recession are giving up hope of finding disabled-friendly employers and have applied for disability payments instead.
Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up...
Heh! As a matter of fact, I was an unpaid deputy sheriff, a volunteer. Same training, same authority, just not on the payroll. The largest such organization is the one in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Reserve.
Virtually ALL of our diplomats, NGO workers, and U.S. installations were protected by Blackwater. They did an exemplary job.
In the "some states" you mention, organized crime was there LONG before municipal - or private - trash collection came about. You're confusing cause and effect.
From Wikipedia:
"Though the fire was one of the largest U.S. disasters of the 19th century, the rebuilding that began almost immediately spurred Chicago's development into one of the most populous and economically important American cities."
For many people making a minimum wage, used Popsickle sticks would be, in a fair and equitable world, a bonus.
Businesses need three things: labor, capital, and raw materials. There is no good reason to treat any of these items with more respect than it deserves.
Who determines what is "deserved"? I happen to think that anyone deserves a wage sufficient to live on (food, shelter, transportation to and from work [at least], health needs) at least for him/herself, if not for a spouse and one or two children as well in exchange for 40 or so hours of work a week.
Perce
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