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.
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.