[jmadsen]

"Of course, this inefficiency plays well into the politics of one of the parties, who hold a religious belief that private enterprise is always more efficient than government"

Which is beyond ironic to anyone who's worked in the corporate world, but I guess that's for another thread.

This idea they have that private enterprise naturally evolves toward the most efficient system is laughable.

[icelancer]

>>Which is beyond ironic to anyone who's worked in the corporate world, but I guess that's for another thread.

>>This idea they have that private enterprise naturally evolves toward the most efficient system is laughable.

Work in private industry AND government and you might find the comparison a bit more apt, not that I'm a Republican.

[Chriky]

I've worked in both, I find bureaucracy is roughly proportional to the seriousness of the work. Serious work - Law, Healthcare, Finance etc are very bureaucratic regardless of whether it's the private or public sector.

Public sector can sometimes seem worse because there's less money sloshing round and people demand it isn't wasted, which effects a lot of bean counting.

[bonesss]

There's also something to the notion that we want our regulatory bodies and government agencies to be slightly 'conservative', to avoid waste and avoid short-term folly. Our public institutions should live for generations, and have transparency and ethical demands placed upon them by the citizenry.

We could collectively decide to eliminate a lot of red tape in government, no problem. It's just the effect of unchecked, unsupervised, unaccountable governments that make us want that red tape in the first place. Todays Justification Paperwork is yesterdays front-page scandal...

[jernfrost]

In my native Norway, we let the public sector and private sector compete to perform public services. I can't say that I've ever seen that the private sector has a clear advantage, otherwise they would already have taken over running everything.

In fact I think I know of far more cases of private companies doing considerably worse job than what the public sector did.

My city recently switched to a private company for garbage collection e.g. It was an absolutely horrible mess. My home town had a care home for mentally ill people, that got taken over by a private company. They promised to run it cheaper than the government. Except they totally messed up everything. They lost a lot of talented people, who quit due to their poor management. Then they demanded to be paid more than the public solution had charged to do the same job.

So not only were they worse, they were also more expensive. Sure these are just anecdotes. But it puts a hole in the claim that the private sector is ALWAYS better. To disprove the notion of always you only need a single counter example.

I am not against private companies. Just let them compete on equal terms and prove that they can do the job better. Unfortunately our conservative government is often so ideologically tied to the idea of private always being better than they push for private sector solutions even when a company is not able to demonstrate that they do a better job.

In fact almost every case I've seen where a private company does the job cheaper, it is because they give their employees worse conditions and salaries, not because of smarter organization and management.

[stcredzero]

I can't say that I've ever seen that the private sector has a clear advantage, otherwise they would already have taken over running everything.

An entity that can rig the courts, the laws, and the regulations to its favor has an advantage.

Sure these are just anecdotes. But it puts a hole in the claim that the private sector is ALWAYS better.

Yeah, that's just magical thinking nonsense. You have to take the situation apart and look at what the incentives are. Economic libertarian woo is just as bad as alternative medicine woo. Markets aren't magic. They are a particular kind of distributed machine. It sounds like that mental hospital/home didn't have a competitive environment, or they couldn't have demanded more funding.

In fact almost every case I've seen where a private company does the job cheaper, it is because they give their employees worse conditions and salaries, not because of smarter organization and management.

In Washington state in the US, there were private DMV counters at Fred Meyer. AAA auto insurance can also do some of these functions. The customer experience is almost universally better at the private counters, because the private employees have incentives to make the customer experience pleasant, and the state employees have none. If a company can cheap out on its employees as compared to the state, and the level of service stays the same, then the market worked. If a company does that, and the level of service gets crappier, but the company doesn't face consequences, then the market has not worked. I bet, if you tried hard to prove the null hypothesis and looked for circumstances that would interfere with the market, you'd find them.

[Dylan16807]

> An entity that can rig the courts, the laws, and the regulations to its favor has an advantage.

You really think the garbage collection department has that much influence?

[mindslight]

Yes. For one, they've obtained a position where you are forced to patronize them, even if you would choose to not utilize their services. For two, they generally get themselves excepted from local regulations (eg noise ordinances) for essentially convenience purposes.

Having said that, "privatized" trash collection creates its own type of shithole - whether it's a single vendor obtaining a city's exclusive contract for politicians' short-term balance sheet gains, or many competing services that result in visits by multiple trash trucks every single day.

[Dylan16807]

> For one, they've obtained a position where you are forced to patronize them, even if you would choose to not utilize their services.

If a private service is being chosen, they have that same position. This is not an advantage that government-run pickup has over private pickup.

> For two, they generally get themselves excepted from local regulations (eg noise ordinances) for essentially convenience purposes.

I'd expect similar laws to be in play no matter who is chosen, is that unrealistic?

[stcredzero]

You really think the garbage collection department has that much influence?

By itself, no, but perhaps the politicians behind the political deals to change the garbage collection department do.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I've worked in both, they're really not that different. Large organizations just seem to gravitate towards inefficiency.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm of belief that the inefficiency scales with internal organizational complexity, which roughly scales with size. Basically, the more people you need to involve for a typical step in a project, the less efficient you get. Government branches seem to be terribly inefficient, because even the smallest one is in fact responsible to a lot of people (other agencies, oversight bodies, politicians and, ultimately, the public).

[enraged_camel]

I'm a business analyst and work with both private sector and government clients. From about a decade of analyzing how each type operates, I can tell you that the amount of bullshit that goes on in them is about the same level.

[icelancer]

Completely disagree. Government RFPs are an order of magnitude more absurd than private sector bureaucratic requests. It's not even close.

[enraged_camel]

Sure, but the private sector has its own equivalent vehicles of waste, such as corporate executives getting paid insane salaries and bonuses even for average performance. You don’t get that in government because salaries are capped.

[KhanMahGretsch]

>This idea they have that private enterprise naturally evolves toward the most efficient system is laughable.

This is a straw-man, nobody claims that private enterprises are necessarily more efficient than government organisations. What is claimed, however, is that a free-market system invariably leads to better processes and products, compared to a government monopoly, because there is a competitive advantage in optimising overheads.

To suggest that government organisations are "often" or even "occasionally" more efficient than private organisations is quite chuckle-worthy.