It is really a question of how one views the voice vs exit question, and how good a check those are (relative to each other).[1]
In which universe?
Government projects get stopped for incompetence or wasting money about as much as they do in the private sector.
And it turns out that the private sector is just as capable of firehosing money at bullshit as the government is, otherwise all those repackaged loans wouldn't have screwed the economy.
There is a different limit on money for governments, given they back the money, but to assume that some form of cost/benefit analysis isn't generally practiced in public enterprise is to be working from a purely faith-based model of economics.
I'm not sure even this claim is warranted, from either side. Each has mechanisms for attempting to ensure the link between funding/performance, but from my perspective it seems like those mechanisms fail as often as they work in both sectors.
This cuts both ways - that's exactly why the government can and does shove money into things like infrastructure, basic research and, well, space exploration, while the private sector doesn't. There is no direct short-term profit motive for private sector in such endeavours. I emphasize "short-term", because the private sector is structured to care mostly about that. It takes a company to grow really big to invest in stuff like basic research - but at this point the internal structure of such company is more like that of a government than a free market.
The main difference is the profit motive. When a government department does something more efficiently, it has to use that efficiency to either reduce cost or improve quality.
When a private company does something more efficiently, it can take the spare money and shove it in the pockets of its shareholders.
It's not a guarantee that a particular public sector project or department will be more efficient than an equivalent private sector one; the Peter Principle may well scupper any efficiency improvements.
In addition, corporations which are closely-held have a very strong incentive to be efficient, as the officers/owners are the residual claimants. In larger, public corporations, their checks are shareholders, and their competitors, who (if more efficient) can drive a corporation bankrupt by under-pricing, or out-competing. I cannot recall the last government department driven to bankruptcy by a competitor.
It's not a symptom of public vs private, it's a symptom of lack of oversight, agency problem, and 'too big to manage' problems.
Government offices I've visited are no comparison to lush corporate settings; in fact they tend to be old buildings with old equipment and furniture. Consider what Silicon Valley corporations provide to their employees.
I've heard this story before and I believe it's a myth. I am aware of what goes on in many government offices, local and federal, and never heard of such a thing.
Democratic societies can choose to elect better suited leaders for their governance to do the job better, and vote to improve their models of governance to be more effective and provide better services/efficiency. Ideally - it happens occasionally, though not often.
Voting with dollars works about as well as voting with ballots, though. People are driven by the exact same irrational drives and misinformation whether they're behaving as consumers or voters.
The organisation includes the bit setting the budget, so if they are willing to cut it next year if this year's isn't spent, that looks a lot like the behaviour of an organisation seeking to reduce costs.
Besides, end of financial year budget spends in divisions of large multinationals also look like that.
I even found this convenient little slideshow.[7]
Here is a challenge: find more equivalently-sized government departments shut down for their failures. Examples of such failures would be the two dozen financial market regulators (as well as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) who failed to anticipate or mitigate the housing problems of 2006-2007, the various police agencies which regularly shoot innocent civilians (such as the LAPD), the department of Veteran's Affairs which caused untold suffering, or the education departments which have greatly increased spending without any improvement in outcomes.
Apologies for not addressing the second sentence, I wrote this reply before you had added that.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors
[7] http://www.thestreet.com/gallery/tsc-bankruptcy2-decade/0/ph...
The point is that there are some things which only government can and should do. Shutting down vital services isn't practical nor popular. People wouldn't stand for it. If a the leaders of a city the size of LA decided to shut down the police force and replace it with something different, they would be immediately voted out of office. The government isn't some external actor forcing its will on the people. The government serves the majority, a majority that prefers that not to have basic services shut down because they aren't performing optimally.
However in the private sector this happens all the time; either forcing one company to re-organize or a re-organization happens by a company going out of business and getting replaced with another one.
Voting for a politician (especially when you are stuck with two political parties) hardly constitutes voting for a re-organization.
Maybe there is a way to create competition in some way shape or form by having several different police forces (still government sponsored) that compete for your vote or maybe something else. But there definitely is a problem that there is almost no way to properly restructure a bloated government organization when it is underperforming, and somehow that should be addressed.
The public is unhappy with Thames Water, a private company, but no amount of private sector competition pixie dust is going to make another company start digging up London's streets to provide a re-organization.
It's not a problem with governments, it's a problem with natural monopolies and that's difficult to solve. Saying "government bad" is oversimplifying.
This is not a reasonable position, nor is it consistent with the rest of your comment.
If I pay £10 for something that costs £5. The organisation that just pockets the difference is less efficient from my perspective than the one that either reduces my next bill by £5 or gives me an extra £5 worth of service.
The point is that even if a private sector company operates with perfect efficiency, there is a built-in inefficiency from the consumer's perspective because investors need to make money on the deal.
The caveat is there because a handful of strategically placed idiots or geniues could easily make more of a difference than the fact that all the money stays within the system.
Every government executive's job (including appointees' jobs and to a degree every program), relies on a public vote every 2-6 years.
Democracy isn't nearly perfect, but as we've seen, neither are the markets.
You're right that I didn't; sorry. I have a hard time putting faith in the value or accuracy of Wikipedia, especially for sophisticated analysis.
I know that's a commonly repeated idea, especially in this forum, but I don't share that assumption and don't see evidence for it. I believe they are two different tools, each better at different tasks, with some overlap.
> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.
Three thoughts: 1) Government doesn't contract out every task; the U.S. federal government has over 1 million employees and a $2 trillion budget, so it does quite a bit in-house. 2) Government does contract out many things; when they do it right, they are contracting where it's most cost-effective without undermining justice. There is much research showing that much privatization loses money but enriches the contractor. 3) Many of the contracting decisions are due to politics: Lobbying, and who has what donor or has which jobs in their district, for example.
Consider that many privatization advocates and those promoting the supremacy of the private sector are lining their pockets: They are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful.