Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failure by the government. Seemingly beneficial regulations create barriers to entry that prevent dysfunctional companies from being replaced. IP law, even copyright (in its current, out-of-control practically perpetual form) is regulation that protects large incumbents in media and tech and other sectors from competition.
Even if that is true, in some areas companies' interests strongly misalign with that of citizens. An insurance company earns more by rejecting customer declarations. An ISP earns more by giving customers less bandwidth for a higher price. A toll road company earns more by doing as little maintenance they can get away with, while keeping prices high.
Yes, in a perfect market, customers will flock to competitors that are better for them. However, in many cases a perfect market is not attainable for various reasons. E.g. because the cost of entry is too high (e.g. making a competing ISP would require you to put your own fiber in the ground) or because there are network effects that are nearly impossible to break.
This is why certain markets need strong regulation or government monopolies -- to protect people from pure profit seeking. Health care is a good example. Health care in Western Europe is much better, while less money is spent on health care. This is because health care is strongly regulated and insurance companies cannot f*ck over customers. The objective function of maximizing profits becomes a constrained optimization problem, which generally leads to other ways to increase profits, like pressuring pharmaceutical companies to lower prices of medicines.
The issue with healthcare is that providers have leverage over insurers, not that there is a lack of competition for insurance.
How is a discerning buyer supposed to choose insurance based on anything but price when that is the only information available?
Then there's the entire bureaucracy that is medical billing. You have to know which obscure codes for diagnosis can be used with which, similarly obscure, codes for treatment. None of those codes ever exactly match what is happening to the patient, so you have to choose one that is close enough and hope the insurance agrees.
You ever wonder why it takes 6+ months to get a medical bill? That's why. It has to be processed by the medical billing bureaucracy until it bears only the slightest resemblance to reality and then shuttled back and forth between the provider, the insurance filing system, and the insurance underwriter. Only once that is done can they send you a bill.
How much cheaper could providers offer service if they didn't have to pay dedicated staff to play some perverse game of telephone with the insurance company?
Capitalism just means private people control the capital, rather than the state. Beyond that and you’re in different forms of capitalism. There’s no requirement of competition.
Have we really already forgotten "Too big to fail"? It wasn't that long ago that those words were uttered and the US gov't bailed out failing private companies with taxpayer money.
And on the topic of profitability that pops up in these discussions, what about public transport? Healhcare? Power plants? Nuclear weapons maintenance? Should these be "profitable"? Is profit supposed to be the be-all-end-all state for everything? Because from where I'm standing, profit incentives make the world an actively worse place when it's free from oversight and regulation. If it were up to Nestle, the entire planet would be a giant reservoir only they could draw water from in order to produce soda. If it were up to Chiquita, all of South America would be a giant banana plantation to the point where they funded actual paramilitary organizations to achieve that goal.
The most profitable route for most companies is the route that is objectively worse for everyone involved minus the shareholders that reap the profits from their antisocial, short-term-minded destructive behaviors.
The entirety of the GP's post (other than the part you quoted) addresses that exact point.
Moreover, Eversource has their hands in any solar projects. They drag out the process to approve any installations and fight you tooth and nail to make sure you can’t install a big enough system because they are mandated to buy electricity at the same rate as they sell it. They fully captured the market and are essential to the state’s functioning so whenever there is an issue the government backs them. When there isn’t, they post billions in profits.
What part of that sounds correct to you?
Here's the important part. Regulatory capture and monopolies don't want or need things to be implemented well, because that leads to alternative options.
No, there are not. You can't have 15 different companies running 15 different cables over 15 different sets of electric poles into a house, each competing on delivery of electricity (or water, or sewage, or...).
Well, you can, but there's nothing good or efficient about it.
First you claim oversimplification and then you write a sentence that feels like a "but when implemented well".
Tell me how this is a market in a reasonably sized city, and how many parallel electric lines, water and sewer pipes you can run for the market to be well implemented?
Bonus question: how many competing power lines can be run from a single power plant? 1? 2? 10?
Of course a privately-owned one doesn't work either, because there's no competition.
Private companies are inefficient by definition when individuals are able to extract millions to billions of dollars from the market.
Yes, the participants of those markets are various degrees of willingness. No, I do not agree that makes them efficient.
It's especially ironic because if markets actually worked the way the "free market" dogma supposes they do, central planning would also work.
Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to grandstand by reducing your budget.
Waste a few million on a Salesforce implementation that never works, never does what it promised and never gains adoption and is finally quietly abandoned? Doesn't even make the Shareholder meeting and the exec in question gets even more influence for his ability to lead large projects.
If your talking things like their "org chart"* maybe, sort of. There's nothing there that wasn't already available pretty easily via OPM, but one could argue it's a nicer interface. To the extent that it's actually revealed anything to anyone is argue that it has more to do with it being the trending news so people actually bother to look, rather than it being "hidden" before.
https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106...
No, it was all publicly debated and passed by Congress, and openly available for anyone to see.
It just never served anyone's political agenda to nitpick and distort and publicize it until the current Administration.
The US healthcare system is evidence that this is an overly simplistic view.
In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it.
In a for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered shareholder value, and we work to increase it.
That’s cute. But the reality is often closer to this version:
In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care.
That's not hard...
US is the richest nation with poor healthcare. Think about that...
In Spain it is the privatization of the healthcare that is "given to themselves and call it patient care", making politician friends (and politicians themselves) richer and corrupt, and selling it as a way to "fix the healthcare" that they are breaking.
Can you share some significant real-world examples of this happening?
For example, in western Pennsylvania, there is UPMC. According to court documents, UPMC acquired 28 competitors between 1996 and 2018. According to the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office, in 2011 UPMC announced it would stop accepting patients insured by its competitor, Highmark. This prompted the PA government to "enter into consent decrees with both UPMC and Highmark to protect access to care." Which, again according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office, UPMC continued to violate. This has lead to, among other things, a recent antitrust lawsuit supported by the US Justice Dept. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/upmc/
[2] https://www.wesa.fm/health-science-tech/2024-10-03/justice-d...
I wonder if there are examples of this type of thing happening in places outside the USA, like Western Europe for example.
Yes, that is corruption. However, it is being punished!
If a for profit insurance/hospital group does this in the USA, taking money from patient care to profit... there is no punishment. There is encouragement. Correct?
> Yes, that is corruption. However, it is being punished!
In the example I shared, the evidence suggests that the punishment, as you call it, has not been adequate to solve the problem. And that problem has been ongoing for a decade and a half. And still continues.
For profit: While company A keeps the profit, company B lowers its prices instead. Now customers are going to company B instead of A.
Im not saying that this is how it's done, but in the real world, things are not that simple.
Wouldn't the largest private health insurer just buy up all the smaller ones, and then how exactly would competition work?
I would argue that replacing a private company that performs a critical government function poorly is actually more difficult than eliminating and reforming an agency like USAID or ICE.
Google search is nothing but ads but the majority still use it.
A clue to why this dysfunctional market exists is all the tech CEOs pay homage to the Oval Office and shove monies into untraceable PACs thanks to Citizens United.
Only—and this is a critical detail—if the market is competitive.
Otherwise, a government entity answerable to elected officials at some level is more efficient.
Are either of those endeavors necessary? Are they profitable? Should they be profitable?
Like health care and higher education?
Canada and Mexico will be happy to buy some of your failed states.
All the new HOV lanes around DC are public-private partnerships with flex tolls that are paid by the mile. And have revenue protection for the private entity built in.
Unfortunately, there isn't enough competition for this to be true. In many markets the largest incumbents are able to build a moat to stop smaller, smarter companies from competing. Sometimes this is regulatory capture, but it can also be that the market is a natural winner-take-all market, and in that case well-thought-out regulation can be necessary to enforce competition.
Venture capitalists shy away from funding companies that want to compete in a well established market. They view it as a race to the bottom with no huge payout.
Once a company is large and well established, it can be as bloated and inefficient as any government, and it will extract rent with it's IP, real-estate, and means-of-production for decades before it has to worry about failure.
I usually see cronyism described through the lens of the market - the industrialist uses their market position to gain influence in the government.
But what happened this time appears to be the inverse. The government granted cronies market dominance by regulating away their competition. In exchange for this, there is an unspoken rule that when the government shows up with a “request” the cronies treat it as a demand.
We’ve seen this mechanism be used to launder away constitutional protections by having the stages of enforcement cross the private/public boundary. What the government hand can’t do, they rely on the market hand to do, and vice versa. Two hands, same system, but exploiting a bug in the system.
I call this crony totalitarianism. It’s not a capitalism or constitutional republic thing. It’s people who have found exploits in the system so that they can work around capitalism and the constitution.
However, if you are implying that only companies, and not nations, can fail and be replaced, I'd disagree. This has happened many times in the past.
I really liked this history video on the topic, which is rooted in how the founders of the USA were very familiar with a theory about how that happens called anacyclosis and they had originally designed the constitution to avoid that, where the theory proposes that democracies tend to dissolve when a populist demagogue takes over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton both very much feared that allowing the public to vote for more than members of the House of Representatives would eventually lead to the "uninformed, overly emotional public" to elect a demagogue.
You can say this is due to corporatism, which is often true as well, but gov't regulation is required for natural monopolies.
This is to avoid issues like the early railroad boom where they hugely overbuilt, a lot of them went under and/or eventually coalesced into a few monopolies, which needed regulation to prevent them squeezing their customers to death.
The best markets are sensibly regulated. It's a balance, not a binary.
Maybe they can, but they just as often don't. How much 'waste and useless things' do you think is at Microsoft or Google, yet is financially insulated due to their outrageous success elsewhere.
The goal of any profit seeking company selling to the government is to extract as much value as possible. The goal is not just to provide X service which was initially requested at a price that undercuts your competition. The goal is to win the contract for X for year 1, and then to under-deliver it in a way that the customer is basically forced to buy X for year 2, because it would be a massive lift to shift to a different service, but probably the customer needs to buy Xv2 to actually accomplish anything and by the way Xv2 works best if you also buy services Y and Z. Perhaps you do some "study" to determine that actually the problem is larger than what the customer initially described and several other expensive problems must be tackled to fully solve it. Efficient use of tax-dollars to solve the problem within the scope described is not the goal of government contractors. These companies grade themselves based on their revenue and margins, not on what they deliver to the tax payers. They're profit-seeking companies and they do just that.
By contrast, when government agencies are working well, they do what they're chartered to do by Congress. Whether that goal is good or not may be a matter of perspective (e.g. do we need a separate SEC and CFTC and CFPB? Could there be a single financial products/services regulator?) but to the degree their stated missions are incoherent, that's at least partly a failure of Congress, which the people have an indirect way of correcting.
I (and many others) have worked for, contracted for, interacted with, and/or closely observed government for decades. The only “reflexive” thing here is your argument that people who disagree with the you are the victims of propaganda.
You can certainly quibble with the details on how to deliver government efficiency (and I highly encourage people to sincerely scrutinize any efforts to do so - it should produce better results), but there are good and valid reality-based reasons that the “DOGE” mission has broad support.
If you want to use the "private sector lense" (which I do not think is valid for a govenenent bureaucracy), there's a reason why when I've participated in M&A events, we would spend a year doing due diligence and understanding the organizational and financial structure before initiating an event.
By haphazardly doing these kinds of initiatives without even understanding regulations and laws means any potential savings will be burnt in litigation and cleaning up messes.
Having an government organization underfunded and understaffed to fulfill its mission leads to more waste, both on the public and private side.
For example, the solution isnt to fire employees, it is to simplify the tax code.
Exactly!
That doesn't follow at all. Plenty of cost and waste arises while carrying out things that are solidly within the scope of a federal government in the eyes of belief system but anarchism and other forms of extreme heterodoxy. To "provide for the common defense" is literally in the Constitution, yet the DoD is a black hole of funding, while soldiers eat powdered eggs on base.
If you want to actually improve governance (and we really should because it is in fact often quite dysfunctional), you don't come in with the notion that it is intrinsically rotten to the core and the very idea of governance is flawed by nature.
You start by motivating people to improve. Which you don't do by accusing them of graft, corruption and incompetence.
It's all very disingenuous.
If all you have is insinuations and hearsay... Well, can't help you.
But one does not run a decent poultry farm by putting foxes in charge of the hen house.
There are really two type if inefficiencies being conflated here. That of the workers, and that of the organizations.
For the organization, firing does nothing. You have to start by reducing the scope and simplifying the legislation of those organizations. E.g fix the tax code, eliminate the department of education, streamline EPA objectives.
For the worker incentive, this is really a classic public sector union debate, and should be treated as such.
So if there were policy and organizational changes they wanted to make, they now have the power to do it, through passing laws.
But they're not doing that. Which really draws attention to the fact that it's not the manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by the following statement:
>manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.
Where are you drawing the distinction? I imagine someone could disagree with both what government does and what it is.
Government is what we make it. A snapshot in time of your own experience does not define government and its capabilities.
Sure, maybe there is broad support for making government more efficient, but that is not in any way what Elon Musk is trying to do. So if there is broad support for DOGE those people are entirely wrong to believe they are aligned with Elon, and entirely wrong about supporting DOGE as the means to achieve their goals.
That being the case, these same people cannot be trusted to understand our government and how it functions and where the inefficiencies are. If you support the DOGE mission you do not actually support making the government more efficient, so alluding to that support is a red herring. Worse than a red herring, it shows that their anti-government views are not based in reality and facts.
If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email."
If you want to know what people are working on, you work with the management chains because those are the people whose job it is to know what their people are working on. You take your time to dig into the data, talk to people at all levels, understand the structure and the work. This request, in the way and fashion it was made, shows an incredible lack of disrespect, distrust, and disregard for federal employees across the board. If I were a government employee and received that mail, I would be unable to avoid expressing my own disrespect and distrust in my reply.
These emails sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy where government fails to serve the people. Some people leave public service. Others stay but are disillusioned and checked out because they know their actual job performance no longer matters, the whims of a billionaire who voted with his wallet to make himself co-president can destroy their livelihood at any moment. Over time, you have people who are unable to leave and thus will do what they're told out of fear, and unqualified loyalists who just do what they're told.
I can never know what I’d do when faced with a position where I believed some of my budget was going to pay dead and inactive employees, and where members of the management chain were insubordinate and unwilling to help identify the issue and even complicit. I’d guess I’d just fire them all. Is that more humane?
At the team level, that is of course quite reasonable.
Doing this from a top-down approach in an organization at any real scale is fucking insane.
"To the board: if you have this level of distrust for my management, you should fire me immediately. This request is out of line, and shows great disrespect for our employees as well as myself. If you are dissatisfied with the information you receive about the company's operations and performance, you can talk to me and my staff about that. I will not allow you to display such callous disregard for the people under my leadership."
You would write "Ask HN: my company has thousands of employees, a board member showed up in Slack and told everyone to write him a weekly summary, or we'll be fired, what to do?" and everybody would be like "WTF that's beyond stupid, name the company, also it's time to polish your resume!" yada yada.
Don't be obtuse.
And it’s not the board that send the emails, it’s a committee created by the board.
It’s unclear whether OPM has the authority to order employees to do anything.
The real way to do this. If it was what they actually wanted to happen was for the president to issue an executive order requiring everyone to logon to a secure site and fill out a form. Then give some kind of reasonable deadline that makes allowances for people on PTO or leave.
If a board wants something done, they can urge the CEO to implement it, but they do not hold unilateral power to dictate internal operations. They can vote to remove the CEO if they feel that they aren’t producing the desired result, but again, this is an indirect action.
DOGE are not the boss of most (any?) government departments. Its entire purpose, legally, is to improve software: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...
So once again, who are they to ask this, legally? Who are they to fire employees from other departments who rightfully deny this request?
What a wild take!
Only some of sooo many reports all over the media 5-6 days ago that you somehow missed:
"Key US agencies tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0qrj20g5vo
"Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Emails: Agency Leaders Can Decide If Employees Must Reply, White House Says"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/25/elon-mu...
And the latest from today:
"Some government employees are instructed — again — to not respond to 5 things email as Musk doubles down"
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/5-things-email-nati...
They answer directly to the President. The email was sent by someone at OPM who also answers directly to the President.
The President has issued no formal orders regarding these emails. He did issue an executive order telling employees to comply with DOGE requests but this email came from OPM not DOGE.
There whole thing is an unclear clusterfuck.
Once again, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/27/opm-firing-probatio...
> A judge ruled Thursday that the Office of Personnel Management — the central human resources office for the federal government — broke the law when it ordered other federal agencies to terminate thousands of “probationary” employees.
> “OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees within another agency,” the judge said.
This is entirely false. This is so incredibly false that I am actually shocked you were willing to post it. It is hard for me to imagine anything more absurd and untrue someone could have said about this topic. I tremble with fear thinking about what your media diet must look like in order for you to believe this absolute nonsense.
This email came AFTER thousands of layoffs!
You have implied every laid-off employee was given a chance to reply to the email and didn’t, which is contrary to TFA.
2nd “what did you do” email came Friday, 28, Feb.
1st “what did you do” email came Saturday 22 Feb.
Some other points:
* The second email came "late Friday" and the layoffs happened hours later at 1 am on Saturday, so it's not reasonable to count the second email as a warning or genuine attempt to find the "good" employees. I'm guessing it was just blasted out and happened to land in their inboxes before the firing notice did.
* Based on https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/general-services-ad... it appears the entire 18F unit was cut, so this doesn't seem targeted or predicated on email responses. Also, I'm not a leader, but if 100% of my organization didn't comply with an order, cutting them all is probably a much less effective decision than trying to meet them half-way. I guess if they've truly been doing nothing for years, there would be no loss, but that seems unlikely to be true in most cases including 18F's.
* Your initial comment appeared to be speaking generally on DOGE cuts, so it is fair for us to be responding accordingly. 18F seems to have been pretty small, but part of the reason this story is interesting is everything else DOGE is doing. As we've said, plenty of cuts happened before and independent of any email. Personally I'm doubtful that responding does much, but I'd be interested in any reporting on employee's experiences or what DOGE is saying about responses and how it affects their decisions.
Like I said above, I don't think TFA mentioned 18F's responses and there's not really a good reason to assume that the layoffs were due to no response.
They were asked first last last week. And then again on Friday.
——
> According to Politico, the emails — prompting employees to list their weekly accomplishments by Monday — were widely distributed across multiple agencies, including the State Department, the IRS, and the NIH.
I’m not making this shit up…
And yet you act like he is.
Who is he to order DoD or DoJ employees to write this email?
It doesn’t matter either way. The President has the authority to order employees to perform certain tasks but he has to do it through proper channels.
OPM doesn’t have the authority to order non-OPM employees to perform specific duties. They never have in the past. And the President has issued no executive orders stating that OPM has this authority now.
Reductions in force due to mission/budget/etc. changes, etc., which are based on seniority, not firings, which are (where civil service protections apply) exclusively for documented misconduct or incompetence and have due process protections.
It’s true that private industry (at least outside of unionized workplaces) leverage at-will employment to blur the line between mission/budget-based staffing reductions and for-cause firings, but the civil service isn’t at will and the line is a sharp legal distinction.
Is bureaucrary inevitable? A side effect of organizational psychology?
I have no clue.
But until someone divines a better way to coordinate humans, we just have to suck it up.
Which is the original definition of the "Deep state" until it was hijacked by conspiracy theorists and Republicans who do bad shit.
These are defensible positions based on various world views, but they should not be accepted automatically. But I see here and other places people speaking as if this is just "obvious fact."
This was not the case in the past. Civic duty, the need for a functioning civil service, the notion of a commonwealth and/or social contract, etc are all foundational notions coming out of the enlightenment and were at least formerly mainstream.
The Ayn Rand types have always been around. And they're welcome to their positions. I'm concerned about how we get here now that this is a default position for people to take in North American society. I certainly don't agree with it. And I suspect if you force the majority of "mainstream" people to go through the arguments piece by piece, they wouldn't either.
I'd also argue that decades of corroding the public service's effectiveness through economic and ideological warfare has in fact made the public service look like exactly the thing its enemies claim it is. If you make the civil sector into a partisan battle, and play games with its funding, and spread cynicism about its motives... surprise you're going to get a partisan, inefficient, and cynical public service.
I remember when this was considered essential to being an American Citizen. We had classes on this in K-12.
Sometime in the last decade or so, it's become synonymous with "communist."
Which is pretty rich, considering what's going on, these days.
Both Abe Lincoln and Joe McCarthy are doing 3200 RPM, right now. That's pretty crazy.
So, no, it's not "communist" to advocate a functioning civil sector.
I was raised in the Cold War "Red Menace" days, and Civic Duty was considered "Red-Blooded American." My father[0] was in the CIA. He was a Harvard LLB, and could have been quite wealthy, but chose what he considered his Civic Duty, as a career (which wasn't really rewarded well).
I've never been particularly extreme, myself (very centrist -a vanishing species), but Civic Duty has always been important to me, and to my family, for generations.
That no longer seems to be the case.
And yet every single time Communists (Lenin included) have gotten into power...
(I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater though. There are theoreticians who have added a lot more nuance here, especially Poulantzas)
Nobody refuses free government help even if they hate the government, just as no one pays extra taxes even if they love the government. The point is always to distribute their belief more widely so that everyone has to live with it.
"Gotcha" hypocrisy arguments about personal behaviour I don't think are great taken from either left nor right.
Which, perhaps ironically, shows that welfare works as intended, even for morons that want to see it dismantled.
Looking at federal spending as a percentage of GDP [1] it seems we've been hovering around 20% for most of post-WW2. There was a huge spike for COVID and a smaller spike for the GFC. (It was pretty surprising this chart doesn't also show a huge spike for the response to 9/11.)
Pre-2020 spending was ~20% of GDP, pre-2018 was more like ~18% - 19%.
There's definitely more government spending than there used to be.
What we’re missing is a willingness/ability to break up overreaching corporations and states. We used to be better about it - see 19th-century Europe, especially France - but fighting back obviously has costs.
Centralized power isn’t great at supporting human life, but it’s very good at dominating human life. So large corporations and states have been bedfellows and dominated us for the last century or so by greatly elevating the cost of actually fighting back against their united power.
Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people, and because there is a stronger incentive to do so - reducing salary/wage expenditure increases profit. Yes there will always be some in both, but having worked in both public and private sectors, you see more of it in the public sector.
A few days ago I was talking to the employees of a homelessness charity at a social event, one of whom was telling me he felt NGOs waste money more than for-profit businesses, but not as much as the public sector. The reason he said it, was his employer was still paying rent on an office building despite it being uninhabitable due to mould and water damage - my question was if the building was uninhabitable why not cancel the lease, surely that would give justifiable grounds to do so, and then they’d have more money to spend on the homeless (or, he added, pay their employees more)
It is incredibly hard to understand what people are doing, and how that works out in a complex organization!
The effort and likelihood of reasonable success is a precondition for your argument.
I have been in a lot of companies, and I have seen soooo much useless busy work. Including my own well-paid IT consultant job, not infrequently.
Employees and managers on all levels try very hard to justify their existence. When they are under-employed they may also start looking for new projects themselves, which the next level of management is okay with because it appears that they are doing something useful, and they don't have to deal with that problem.
Overall, I will claim that your argument is far too simplistic and ignores the complexity of humans and their organizations.
Its not though, its the same layers of documentation, paperwork, upper management approvals, legal and HR approvals. The only exception being blatant policy violations like drug use, etc. where immediate dismissal can be done.
If you are talking about mass layoffs, for large corporations they still have to file paperwork for the WARN act, look at laws in various states around employment, get legal, HR, etc. involved.
I've seen both mass layoff and single individual layoff first hand and the only thing that might be different with Federal employees is a union. And in that case a union operates mostly the same if its serving a large corp or a government entity.
Imo and ime, much of the bloat that exists in the federal service is becuase of legislative and executive pork barrel politics that drastically expands mission scope with no equivalent increase in resources, forcing these agencies to have to resort to semi-privatized solutions.
There can and is a healthy way to manage public-private relations but the DOGE model is obviously wrong.
It's guaranteed the federal government is going to have waste and be very difficult to change because you cannot let it fail.
For example, the only way not to waste any food whatsoever, is not to eat. It is inevitable there will be some small portion of food wasted.
Chasing perfect efficiency is a fool's errand, since humans are not perfect.
We "just" need to switch from monolithic institutions and switch to limited-scale "microservices".
Limit the size of any corporation to at most 150 employees and and forbid any single individual to own/manage/take a seat in the board of directors for more than one company.
Even if inefficiencies might even still be there (because large corporations are able to optimize some process and they can have loss leaders), I can bet the net result will be more transparency, less waste and (most importantly) less chances of billionaires using their wealth to disrupt governments.
Yes, well said. Also, when you are serious about trying to make it more efficient, you need to understand how things work and why and what incentives are in place and how that relates to what the stated purpose is, and a bunch of other things. You can't come in and make random cuts over the course of a few days and expect things to go well.
It's even harder to reach a certain type of "thinker" or "skeptic" who sees such a dividing line between private orgs and governmental orgs because they already style themselves as being critical or intellectual.
Some government entities are great, really efficient, some seem nearly like startups.
Some are nearly all deadweight. A majority of the senior older folks working for in one of the state governments, would eat breakfast, read the newspaper, have lunch, and then try to do something for a couple of hours before going home. I was rather shocked.
I was less so when I encountered it in other places.
The government is an enormous group of entities. Some work well, most I think work ok, and some are horrors. (from a taxpayer perspective, not from the people who work there s perspective)
There is a lot of dead weight in the private sector. The worst examples I have encountered are places where nepotism is king. Older companies seem to accrue dead weight over time. Especially with strong unions¹,
But at some point some new CEO or some such makes attempts to clean house, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I am a huge supporter of unions and I think they are one of the only ways to try to get the US back on track again if enough people are unionized. BUt that is not a silver bullet either.
They were paying $300/hr for a fresh out of college grad working on their first project. The money was allocated, so they didn’t care how much it cost. Anyone with any motivation left employment by the state and became a contractor for 5-10x what their salary was when working for the state. It was disgusting.
Meanwhile in the private sector, companies or deoartments that don’t make money cease to exist after a while. The government can bankroll a failed department with negative outcomes to their purpose indefinitely (and then get more money for to fix their own broken outcomes).
I’m not proposing solutions, and I have recently worked with entrenched utility monopolies with the same segment capture behave the same way. There are, however, significantly more efficient private companies operating at larger scale than some governments.
What do you make of all the people arguing that governments and corporations are not the same, and that what works in one won’t work in the other? This feels like the opposite of that argument.
KBR and other contractors billed the government enormous sums for logistics and operations, including running dining facilities, supply chains, and retail operations. Reports showed waste, overcharging, and inefficiencies, with some contractors billing the U.S. military $45 for a six-pack of soda in extreme cases due to inflated supply chain costs.
I'm certain there are great parts of government, but I've never experienced it, and all I'm hearing from friends who work at the federal level is that it's no different there.
I certainly wouldn't trust corporations with government functions.
And while the German's government eventual recognition that fax machines are no longer the state of the art is an extreme case, I believe it's exemplifies the problem. Private companies, both large and small, have done that much earlier.
Those profits they're chasing above all else are a powerful driver for innovation and optimization.
They are also a powerful driver for exploitation both of employees and of the general public.
Be careful with what you wish for. I certainly prefer dealing with a public sector that still operate on fax machines but that still may fundamentally work for the public good (as inefficient as it may be), than with a corporation that would bleed me dry if it would means some asshole CEO makes a few extra bucks in his annual comp.
Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required. That's individually much less of a problem than that greedy CEO you envision, but it adds up in large numbers and becomes a problem if not corrected - and there's no strong incentive to correct it when you play with the infinite money hack enabled.
Human nature has to be taken into account either way. It's just a lot easier when you acknowledge that it exists. Massively oversimplified: that's why the Soviets had to build walls to make it hard for their people to leave and murder those who tried. You can ignore human nature, but human nature won't ignore you.
Except that is not really my observation of someone that dealt with the public sector extensively in multiple different countries.
More often than not I dealt with people that were really trying to do a good job and were helpful to an extent.
Yes, there are lazy people that just want to coast (as if those don't exist in the private sector) and there is a level of corruption (also let's pretend that there's no corruption in the private sector). But that is definitely not the majority, especially in countries that more or less work.
> That's individually much less of a problem than that greedy CEO you envision, but it adds up in large numbers and becomes a problem if not corrected
Again, I disagree. The profit seeking and inherent greet of the any corporation creates a fundamental adversarial condition that is unsolvable. What is good for a corporation tends to almost always be bad for the general public. And there is no incentive to place constraints on the greed of corporations besides government regulations.
> Massively oversimplified: that's why the Soviets had to build walls to make it hard for their people to leave and murder those who tried. You can ignore human nature, but human nature won't ignore you.
You mention the Soviet Union as an example of a government that worked against the people, ignoring plenty of good examples in different countries.
And I am not really the one ignoring human nature when you are essentially willing to surrender the public good to relentless greed. Greed only begets more greed. You would do well to remember that
No, that's not what I meant. I mentioned them because they are the largest experiment in having everything run by the state and ignoring human nature (or, in their case, thinking they could change it by pretending it didn't exist for 20 years). The outcome was people voting with their feet and leaving. And because that's terrible PR and they needed the people to stay, they had to build walls to keep them in.
But that's not because they were "working against the people", it's because their assumptions were deeply flawed.
> And I am not really the one ignoring human nature when you are essentially willing to surrender the public good to relentless greed.
What public good? You mean public services? Why would I pay amount X for garbage collection if someone comes up with a better system and can do it for half of that amount? Currency is a placeholder for resources, why wouldn't you choose the more resource-efficient way? Would it be "greedy" to replace inefficient ways?
I can come up with countless examples of how it is more cost-effective and innovative to exploit people for profit, but I am sure you already got my point.
I think here is where we will have a fundamental disagreement in world views, probably in a way that is impossible to reconcile. You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large. Some government functions are simply incompatible with it, and elsewhere it needs to be curbed with proper regulation.
No, it's not, that's a silly argument. We have hospitals not because we're such great moral people, but _because_ we've figured out that it's much better for society if an illness doesn't mean you have to roll the dice whether you survive.
But at some point, costs become an issue, I'm sure you see that as well, e.g. with an ageing population. It's not even a moral question, at some point you're arguing against the laws of physics. And you may think that human laws are hard to change, but wait until you've tried changing those.
> You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large.
There's some schools of thinking where living in the West is "fundamentally adversarial" to the public at large and we better go back to pre-industrial life, traditional and simple because reject modernity and all that. I don't subscribe to that.
I don't think there's a way to deny that profit-seeking results in progress - the only question is whether you could achieve a similar level of progress without it. I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.
You seem to think I am a communist simply for thinking that profit seeking should be regulated by the government and that government functions should not be in the hands of corporations.
I never once said that corporations should not exist, ot that all profit-seeking activity should be forbidden. You just presumed that, because you hold fairly extremes points of view.
The fact that you don't see how extreme your point of view is turns this conversation in an exercise in frustration. Oh well.
You appear to believe that profit-seeking cannot result in progress, and I disagree. Is that an extreme viewpoint? If you, too, consider self-interest "of the devil", capable only to destroy but not to create ("profit-seeking can [not] be a force that results in progress"), then I suppose it is an extreme viewpoint, much like the idea that the devil could be a force for good.
I just don't believe in the devil, or god, but I believe that you wanting to optimize the outcome for you in a game constrained by rules that require you to create value for others in order to receive value, will end up being much better at creating value than if there was no external motivation for you.
The only countries remotely similar to the US might be Canada and Australia.
> The only countries remotely similar to the US might be Canada and Australia.
Like the US, Canada and Australia are federations - but Germany is too. Unlike the US, Canada, Australia and Germany all have parliamentary rather than presidential systems
So I’m not sure what you are suggesting that Canada and Australia have in common with the US but Germany doesn’t (obviously English and a common law legal system, but I doubt either makes a big difference to government employment)
> but I doubt either makes a big difference to government employment
It does, because employment law (and any other form of law) is largely built on top of a mixture of administrative policy acts along with past rulings and cases.
Fundamentally, Germany and the US are not comparable becuase there are very significant differences between past case law along with administrative hiring procedures.
IMO, the only large federations structurally comparable to Germany are probably Italy, and maybe France or Spain.
> IMO, the only large federations structurally comparable to Germany are probably France and Italy.
Unlike Australia/Canada/Germany/US (among others), neither France nor Italy are federations, both are unitary states with some degree of devolution (significantly more for Italy)
I didn't realize you explicitly asked for that.
In this case, it's the English Law Tradition, and alignment between US and Canadian administrative norms as being part of the same common market.
I recommend reading this paper about the differences in Administrative Procedure legislation (which includes federal employment rules and norms) in Germany versus the US [0]
Fundamentally, "Germany has a tendency to underestimate the importance of the administrative decision-making process while the US takes the procedure more seriously" [0]. That along with Germany's juristic legal tradition becomes the crux of the issue when comparing Germany versus the US, becuase our precedents are entirely different, leading to different causes for dysfunction.
In general, I think online Europeans need to stop comparing the US to their countries. The causes for our dysfunctions are different, and our entire legal, constitutional, and political traditions are VERY different because of a 300-500 year split.
No, administrative procedure law (US APA, German VwVfG) is not the primary legal regime for government employees, they are governed by civil service law (e.g. the Bundesbeamtengesetz in Germany, Title 5 of the United States Code).
> In general, I think online Europeans need to stop comparing the US to their countries. The causes for our dysfunctions are different, and our entire legal, constitutional, and political traditions are VERY different because of a 300-500 year split.
The common law tradition, followed by the US and Canada, originates in Europe (England); among EU member states, Ireland’s legal system is completely based on common law, while Malta has a mixed legal system which combines Roman/French and English legal traditions. Such a mix is not unique to Malta, you can find a similar mix in Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland. Cyprus’ legal system is heavily based on English common law, but also with Ottoman and French influences (the French influence comes via Greece, since modern Greek law was modelled off France)
In terms of political systems, Canada and Germany have a lot in common, both being parliamentary federations - yes one is a constitutional republic the other a monarchy, but that makes little difference in practice. The presidential system used in the US, while common in Latin America, is basically unheard of in Europe; although, the semipresidential system used in France can be viewed as a hybrid between an American-style presidential system and the parliamentary system which is the European norm
So I think North Americans and Europeans have more in common in terms of political and legal traditions than you acknowledge
Organizational culture in one might be different than the other.
I think something Germany and the US have in common, compared to many other countries, is less blatant corruption in government, due to strong laws against it.
It's much easier to remove a Federal Employee in the US compared to Germany. The "give 3 documents" rule makes it easy to not have to deal with lengthy arbitration. At worst, it's comparable to private sector hiring/firing rules in Germany.
Furthemore, hiring practices for federal jobs are much more decentralized in the US compared to Germany.
And finally, the entire corpora of statutes, legislation, and administrative policies in the US is significantly different from that in Germany, such that any surface level similarities are basically convergent evolution.
Any similarity is only at the surface level, because the entire corpora of case law, administrative procedure acts, and past rulings are going to cause entirely distinct dysfunctions.
Both Gonorrhea and the Plague create bubous, but their causes and cures are entirely different.
It's the same with reforming organizational culture.
Someone who used to work in finance told me that once.
Humans are very, very bad at large scale organizational efficiency. I have never seen a very large organization that is not an absolute disaster in terms of waste. The relationship seems to be exponential as a function of organizational size.
There's an extra wrinkle with government though: I am not sure we want government to be too efficient. Government has a monopoly on force. Making it into a bureaucratic tar pit is one time tested way to restrain it and make sure it's subject to proper checks. The cost is high, but the cost of a runaway murderous regime is higher.
Community service as a motivation is actually extremely strong, but becoming more and more invisible in public discourse. With expected results. Which is strange from a nation that is constantly proclaiming its "Christian" foundations?
I have many friends (and a spouse!) who take lower compensation packages so they can work in non-profit or government or other areas where they personally feel they are obtaining some meaning.
I can assure you they work damn hard without fear of "competition."
(EDIT: There are frankly other presuppositions about the nature of private vs public funding and what taxation means/is, but they end up in pointless controversial discussions or downvote fests that I have no interest in getting into this morning...)
1. There is meaningful fraud or waste to cut out.
2. That the goal-post won’t be moved, to squeeze more savings.
3. That the methods that lead to inefficiencies aren’t being repeated.
4. That redundancies are a “waste”. Just in time supply chains are terrible in a disaster, for example.
And everything I’ve seen in the past 50 years and especially in the past month strongly indicate more long-term inefficiencies.
But the TLDR, and I think our generation learned this lesson and maybe it needs to be learned again...? these austerity waves don't actually work. They don't produce better governance and they're actually generally ineffective at reigning in the budget, because there's just a base cost to actually doing things in government that doesn't go away, and the best way to reign in budgetary deficits is to improve the revenue side. The massive inefficiency assumptions are mostly right-wing fantasy and there's just a lot that government actually has to do to keep mass society running.
So, very many government services were and still are at more local government levels.
Still, there are things ripe for privatization, such as commercial rockets, as another poster pointed out.
Then there are complete failures like privatized state and local prisons which are nonsense—what does it even mean to have a competitive market for prisons?—or our monopoly-by-design internet services held hostage by the large ISPs.
These should be largely government run.
But then the monstrosity of US healthcare is a design-by-committee. A pure private system with regulation AND mandated 100% price transparency of services; OR a Japanese/South Korean style national healthcare would still be better than what we have today.
It’s hard for me to give a cohesive answer because it’s such a mixed bag.
Nobody likes bureaucracy, waste, pointless meetings, layers of management, etc. so why does this happen? I think the answer is people create these things to protect something, to feel safe.
So I think these things are inevitable with any large group of people with scarcity. The capitalist/libertarian solution is to remove protections so people cannot create inefficient systems as they will be destroyed through marketplace competition. At least that's what they hope for.
The first problem with this solution is people will always find a way to suppress competition, especially if the guardrails are removed. And secondly, this actually doubles down on the source of the problem. It makes people feel less safe.
Personally, I find inspiration in open source. Is it perfectly free of bureaucracy? No. But because the profit motive is de-emphasized in open source people actually do walk away when faced with BS which is exactly what the capitalists are trying to achieve. In other words, when people's safety isn't dependent on something they are more likely to not put up with corporate/government style bureaucratic BS.
That's why I'm a fan of safety nets and why I think a safe society where people are provided for is the future, not doubling down on this darwinian, survival of the fittest type environment that the USA (at least the people in power here) seem to be pushing for.
If Mark Cuban wants to spend his money on this I don’t see the issue. It’s his to waste.
It's also not true that the organization never disappears. The government functions across all sorts of areas, and departments change or are eliminated all the time.
Which equals worse service.
I've yet to across a privatization project that improved anything for the end user, and I lived through a bunch in the 90s. Interregional rail, public transport, postal, telecom... They were all failures.
There may be one but it’s certainly the exception.
Though it greatly enriches those helming the effort.
No Musk fan, but that company has been doing a real bang-up (literally) job of developing affordable launch systems.
I think the SLS is a disaster, and I suspect is very much in DOGE's crosshairs.
As always, "it depends" is really where the truth lies. There doesn't seem to be anyone that is "always right," or "always wrong."
It's the extremists that believe that there is "always right/wrong," that cause the pain.
Privatization was well under way, but the incumbents were (and still are) awful.
NASA later took a risk with SpaceX, fostered competition, and it paid off enormously.
But this worked out because there was a market and demand (private sector satellites).
Lots of private for-profit cooks involved in SLS. That's the other issue common with privatization: way too easy to blame someone else/each other in the chain of subcontractors.
Repeat providers will win almost all contracts because they know how to navigate the "red tapes" and they know the inner people.
Competition? lol...
These veteran private vendors just happened to know the road leading to a signature vs new competitors who are still learning the ropes.
The more important piece here is that the government ends up not owning anything because it farms out everything to the private, including Government land, critical govt function.
If you think that everything will be done correctly and the critical function won't get abused well then um.... You're looking at things unfold in real time.
It's interesting that:
In the US, people want to protect themselves from the government.
In the EU, people want the government to protect them.
Very profound mindset that leads to the difference in attitudes.
Furthermore, I can point you to SCRUM teams that are small, but are wildly inefficient. Size isn’t the root cause of inefficiency.
The better take is why is the bidding process so opaque? Why the red tape and micromanaging?
Most importantly: Would this still lead to a better outcome than motivated, short-term government employees?
USDS was a 4 year(?) stint; I declined because I need stability in the private sector at this stage of my life and can’t move to DC, but if I were in my 20s I would’ve jumped at the chance.
Edit: Well, not now but in 2019/2020.
I can help you reason through the whys on the inefficiencies if you’re truly interested.
Efficiency isn't the point, the point is funneling more money to themselves and their friends.
You're surprised that the same geniuses who launched a site with an obvious exploit don't understand something about infrastructure? I'm more surprised that they haven't done something like rewriting a critical system in JS (with AI, obviously).
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/business/elon-musk-faa-air-tr...
Purchases of companies owned the CEO / brother. Mother hiring their children to high internal positions.
If you have issues with certain programs or funding, then that is handled by congress NOT the executive.
At least private organizations perform regular layoffs. At least private organizations are accountable to shareholders.
The government is accountable to citizens and citizens voted for this. Yes, it’s disruptive. That’s the point.
It certainly can’t hurt. Alas for the current moment, but it seems the eye we’re turning inward is as far from “critical” as can be.
I believe the government is in need of disruptive change. I welcome the effort.
I believe disruptive change should be undertaken with a deep understanding of the history of an organization and a clear-eyed accounting of its successes and failures.
I see no evidence of this. I believe the current effort is, well, a bit more like a recklessly wielded chainsaw.
I guess I’m more surprised by the low voter turnout. If you voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all, you are partly responsible for the mess being created lol.
Choosing not to pick a side is a choice in itself - not the absence of choice.
The difference is that large businesses constantly competed by other businesses. This either keeps them effective enough to compete, or they get replaced with more functional ones.
The accumulated dysfunction in a 20-50 year old company is large, but on a whole different scale than a 250 year old government.
Not exactly. Ideally, you want to use market and persona segmentation to develop a partial oligopoly.
The nature of sales cycles and the fact that only a minority of organizations (F1000) represent the majority of spend, means that you essentially have 2-3 large players in an single segment, and maybe a couple smaller players that will eventually be acquired.
Oligopols are less competition than ideal, but much better than nothing.
These systems contain huge icebergs of knowledge gained, refined and organized over time. Rooting them like weeds which grow in three days flat is a huge mistake.
I think this whole logic of letting an unproven entity come in and destroy a working system to just “find out” if it works is negligent and malicious.
Ignoring Chesterton's Fences in the short term might look good on paper, but we have seen how companies enshittified themselves for profits (let's reduce the OPEX part).
Doing this to a government will have catastrophic results, and we will watch the slow downfall. It'll be dramatic and painful.
This is all stuff DOGE is actually attacking, not hypothetical 100B NGO donation of which 95% had gone to politicians which they pointedly haven't discovered. Although given the current track record for "savings" they have published, if they did "discover it" we'd probably find that it was just an error in the output of their GPT-authored PDF scraper...
It doesn’t mean I can’t. It means I shouldn’t.
Elsewhere you have claimed this is stated in the article, despite the fact it doesn't state it in the article[1]. It's also already pretty well established that Elon bragged on his platform about "deleting" 18F long before sending out these messages to them and the rest of the federal government. So now you're moving the goalposts again to pretend that Elon's long-established desire to "delete" 18F actually amounts to justified dismissal for "insubordination"
If the best arguments you can muster for DOGE's actions are all in bad faith, perhaps DOGE is not doing a good job.
[1]the article merely notes that they received a second demand for standup updates mere hours before they were advised their entire department had been shut down, which if anything suggests DOGE isn't very good at coordinating what it's doing and that replying to those emails is pointless because you'll get fired anyway It also links to an article which confirms that they were fired because 18F "as been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical", not for "insubordination:
A pertinent example would be Tesla. They shipped approximately 100 cars a month in 2009-2010, with the chassis made by Lotus.
They received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy in 2009 ("people’s hard earned money") to invest in a production plant to make their own cars and batteries. They did so, and launched the Model S a couple of years later.
They paid the loan back in 2013 with 13 million of interest (quite attractive rates, really).
Looking at the wealth that was generated on the back of such a loan, one can only think the government should have taken equity, rather than a percentage point of interest.
If what it takes to ensure research and public services continue, is moving them from government to states and corporations, so be it. In fact, that may be the way out of our horrible partisan divide. The right gets what they want, a shrunken government and ability to enforce their ideology in red states, except they can't control what happens in blue states. The left gets to no longer feel threatened and enforce their ideology in blue states, except they can't control what happens in in red states. What's left of the government resolves interstate disputes and maintains interstate services, though many formerly-interstate services become intrastate (e.g. USPS). The military protects everyone from foreign adversaries. The US doesn't devolve into anarchy.
I suspect that's not what either side wants, but honestly, what's the alternative? Domination, where a large section the population is miserable and angry? Anarchy, where everyone (who can't leave the US at least) suffers? AI superintelligence (I'm skeptical)? Or perhaps the majority left's and majority right's beliefs aren't fundamentally incompatible, and everything seems polarized now, but after some things start breaking and others not breaking, time passes, some people feel betrayed or upset, but the government doesn't collapse, the "average left" and "average right" will be able to respectfully debate each other again. That's what I hope, but I suspect it ends as described above (maybe once people start living in their own ideological areas, the debates are so respectful they wonder why they can't compromise and merge, but when merged they're too emotional to debate or compromise).
Somehow I doubt that external consultants will be cheaper than in-house government employees. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the US needs more bureaucracy:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
As to waste, Reagan tried to find it, bringing in the private sector:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission
* https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/president...
* https://www.gao.gov/products/123531
* https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/convening-experts...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463355
* As did Bush (43): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...
* FDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee
* Truman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
* Clinton/Gore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
There's an entire agency whose job is auditing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Just off the top of my head here’s a list of what that it means to run something like a business: enshitification, make everything a subscription, policies implemented by bots that can not be appealed, dark pattern UI, force people to give up their data by saying it’s necessary and then sell their data, train AI on copyrighted data if it means a snowball’s chance in hell that you can fire your employees, but do this only after spending decades harassing people who think there should essentially be a global library (call it “piracy!”), customer’s don’t own or control their devices, make healthcare about profit, give bailouts to businesses that simply were bad at their core competencies, and I could go on… so could anyone else on HN.
The truth is there is simply more to life than the bottom line, but that no longer stands to be the case when you run the country like a business… because that is the point of the business (the bottom line). Regardless, even if you believe the contrary, that there is nothing else in life beyond the bottom line, then the question remains at how many businesses are simply awful at what they purport to do.
Why anyone would want to exchange the system that has created the most prosperous nation in history for the likes of those who can only compete by not charging for their product is beyond my comprehension. Something tells me though that the issue at hand is not that we, as in the USA, are lacking in prosperity but something deeper and that’s the real reason why everyone’s searching for change.
I won’t be the one to say what it is, as I’d much rather hear what other people think, but I do want to beg the question. Perhaps there is a deeper problem, and perhaps we’re being guided to embrace a solution that will actually make things much worse for most.
That's not what governmental privatization is, instead it is the government handing a company a monopoly.
At least monopolies in the "open" market are subject to absolute price limits by customers. That's not what happens in government. They can be as inefficient as they want, and the government will fund them with "unlimited" pockets, and then they can pay a couple hundred thousand to key senators and they are home free.
At least public institutions are subject to the inherent competition between right and left wing.
Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle ages (or even well before). There will be inept people, waste, corruption, people stealing, etc. but there will also be the vast majority trying to do a good job and feel satisfaction in their work. It doesn't matter if its the federal government or a private corporation, its simply a trade-off of the organization structure. I don't think we, as humans, know of a better/different way to organize that would be more effective.