Asking unironically, because in a monopsony situation when there's only one buyer, a state or federal agency, commercial companies compete in materially different ways than in a free(r) market.
You pop into a conversation about private industry vs government and insist that government organizations have often been much better historically, but they're underfunded now so they're all suffering. Then someone points out that one of your examples is grossly terrible and has always been terrible, and you retreat back to a nearly-meaningless interpretation of your argument: "Oh, I wasn't saying we should actually have the government run things, I just wanted to say that possibly there have been good government bureaus at some point in the past! If you very carefully cherry-pick just the right instant in time and space!"
To that, all I can say is ".. OK"
I don't think you set out to be a troll or anything, and the post office is a pretty good example of exactly what you're trying to say. But you're getting really combative and watering down your core argument that "The Government CAN get things done and has in the past" by attacking people in defense of the nearly-universally-hated VA
I think you're actually trying to hold me to a more precise standard than I ever set out to say. It's like strawmanning my argument. I don't know where my being called combative is coming from; I'm merely pointing out that I never said the things that are being argued against.
Regarding public transportation, for instance: New York's MTA receives about half of its financing as a subsidy. London Tube is a statutory corporation, and can cover only 90% of its expenses from fares. Tokyo Metro is a private entity that shows a healthy profit, and Moscow metro also used to be profitable for a long time. Both Moscow and Tokyo underground infrastructure and service at least are not inferior to NYC's and London's (from my personal experience with 3 of the 4 of them).
If you disallow the government to pay its bills, or effectively haggle, or build the kind of teams it needs, of course it will do a bad job. Meanwhile lots of countries have shown you can have in house teams in the government who make great things.
People will say "the government can't do anything" while cashing their social security check, after driving on the federal highway, drinking their usually clean water, and yelling at their kid's teachers for stupid reasons. We have had 60 years of starve the beast, this was all intentional.
The real question I think is whether there are examples where larger companies gain efficiencies, and if the most efficient way to do something is at a national or international scale, do you want to depend on a massive private companies (likely heavily subsidized) to do it?
That's not handing a public function to the private sector for the sake of finding efficiencies or to fund emergent innovation through competition, that's handing risk-free concessions to a cronies.
It was on HN just two months ago. The One Tiny Law That Keeps Amtrak Terrible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336653
Most of Amtrak’s service runs on track they don’t own, at the mercy of the freight railroads for scheduling and track maintenance.
They are pressured to keep their long distance trains that lose money as a public good, but they aren’t given consistent public funding in return. We treat them as a company that should turn it own profit. We don’t expect the DOT to turn a profit on highways, because we recognize the greater economic impact of having useful highways.
The Northeast Corridor is the exception and notably seems to be the best performing part of the Amtrak network.
Seems to me like the standard American public-private practice of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, and then complaining about how the government loses money.
And, interestingly, the worst part of the Northeast Corridor is the part that's not owned by Amtrak (the Metro North territory between NYC and New Haven).
It isn't only the US that suffers from this. The UK has a bad case of it and even Norway is in danger of doing it.
It's true that Amtrak isn't all that useful beyond the NE corridor, although that's as much a function of the scale of the US as of Amtrak itself.
Competition between the two should lead to an equilibrium between organizational bloat and profit taking.
Here is the thing: commercial companies have incentive to stay efficient as long as there is viable competition from a public agency, which provides a baseline in terms of cost and quality.
As soon as public agencies are out of the picture, then there is little incentive for private companies in staying lean and efficient: Why deliver what you promised when you can go over-budget? The threat that an expensive project will be left unfinished gives you leverage to ask and approve excess costs. Why compete with other companies when you can collude with them and laugh together on your way to the bank?
Draining the US military of 1/5 of it's budget while Russia is invading it's neighbors and China is more aggressive with Taiwan is probably unwise.
Then bringing in federal assets to run an extremely local project (forcing those people to also travel for extended periods of time), with no jurisdiction (fed can't overrule state laws on planning typically) sounds like a disaster.
The government also has a very spotty track record with construction projects.
[0] Wendover Productions has a great video about the insane amount of logistics dedicated to the goal of never having to wait for materiel practically anywhere in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpPuJ_r8Xg
The issue is that the US population has a very low tolerance for combat losses (especially losses defending a foreign country), and the Chinese population (read Communist Party) has a much higher one (especially losses towards what they perceive as country reunification). If in a fight the US inflicts one million Chinese casualties, while incurring one hundred thousand, then the US might call it quits.
The US need not only be able to defeat China, but do it with minimal losses. That's why you need to maintain the huge capabilities gap that currently exists.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I won't speak to whether or not its wise to reduce military funding, but your statement about why you can't have non-locals working on local projects runs counter to my experience.
From about 2004 to 2014, the state of Oregon spent somewhere somewhere around $1.3 billion to repair hundreds of bridges. The consultant managing the effort assembled a team of dozens of highway and bridge engineers, who worked closely with Oregon Department of Transportation, the NTSB and the Federal Highway Administration to make sure it all complied. For the record, getting a state to sign off on bending state regulations is typically a lot easier than getting the Fed to sign off on bending Fed regulations, to the extant that if a state has less stringent road requirements, those state requirements only apply on roads not covered by the FHWA.
At the end of the project, most of those consulting engineers then got flown to other states (Florida and Pennsylvania come to mind) to work on projects of similar sizes. Does a transplant from Oregon have more knowledge of local concerns than a native Floridian and Pennsylvanian? Of course not. But it turns out that you can hire local for negotiating with contractors, but you cannot just hire local when it comes to managing billion-dollar construction projects, if those don't happen very often locally.
The only difference between a federal organization to manage projects of this scale and a private consulting firm is that the bill to the taxpayers on the latter is an order of magnitude larger.
Beyond that, as someone with extensive experience with underground projects and the federal government, the federal government doesn’t pay nearly enough and its benefits lag private industry significantly at this point.
It’s also worth noting that this agency already exists somewhat but spread across departments (FHWA, EPA, etc.). They still outsource to consultants.
I won’t even touch the fact that most infrastructure jobs are only partially funded by the federal government with the remainder funded by local tax or rate payers. The federal government has no interest in cost controls beyond their own money and the residents of State X have no interest in funding more of the infrastructure of State Y than they already do.
The article argues that the real gap is not in people who know how to build things, but in dedicated civil servants who know how to manage those people.
And that is a much more transferrable skill than "how to build this kind of rail tunnel through that kind of soil composition" or whatever.
Read the report the article is about. Milan fills this role for the rest of Italy and somehow figures it out just fine.
Does Milan run all of the EU’s jobs too?
What size organization made the Verrazano and the Golden Gate bridges?
What size organization made the Hoover Dam and the Pacific coast Route 1? Using tiny (compared to the equipment we have now) steam shovels?
If you use the Census Bureau's broadest definition of economically intradependent regions, the Combined Statistical Areas — defined roughly by commuting patterns, which is the relevant scale for a transit system — there are in fact eleven major cities at populations of seven million or higher: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore-Washington, Dallas, San Francisco, Boston-Providence, Houston, Atlanta, Miami and Philadelphia-Wilmington. Over a third of Americans live in one of these "agglomerations". But establishing a system to handle regional planning would require crossing state boundaries in six of those cases.
There are some advantages to local expertise: the geographic and social factors affecting Miami are very different from those in Dallas, which are both very different from San Francisco, which are all totally unlike New York. Establishing the necessary agencies and securing their purview would require federal action, though, I agree.
6 of 11 is more than half of your examples. That alone seems to suggest there would be efficiencies in federally-supervised planning simply to cross-cut inter-state concerns. (Such as with roads, the use of "inter-state" there is not an accident.)
Scrolling further through the list of CSAs the ones between a million people and seven million that are multi-state seem too often to be the least well served by public transportation access today compared to their peers, and that doesn't seem to be a coincidence.
We got to where we are, in the U.S., because we've got massive inefficiency in state and local government. There's only a handful of cities that are massive enough to do projects that would require hiring highly paid specialists to manage these huge projects. Similarly, most states have very few opportunities for long-term career-building public project management. (There's like 3 west of the Mississippi.)
But consolidating all of this expertise in a federal agency tasked with planning and executing massive public projects would allow us to hire career-oriented planners and keep them busy for ever. It's how we run the military, of course. And, ironically, the military is a leech on the U.S. taxpayer, massively bloated and throwing money at foreign problems in the most ham-fisted way just to justify itself – but if you shifted even 20% of the military's spending to a domestic public works department, all that money would not only be to the benefit of the U.S. taxpayer, but you could hire tens of thousands more American workers to do the jobs. It's a win-win for everyone. And it's probably something a lot of legislators could get behind.
Not only that, but a federal public works department would quickly be able to aggregate learnings on improving efficiency – knowing what works and what doesn't – while also being able to wield the power of the federal government to negotiate lower prices.