|
|
|
|
|
|
by hedora
1891 days ago
|
|
|
> And to be clear, there's a good reason for it: it's to prevent corruption. There’s consensus in this thread that this process reinforces corruption, and is controlled by the corrupt, so preventing corruption isn’t the real reason. If you want to prevent corruption, hire engineers directly at market rate, and promote / retain them based on their ability to deliver projects. If you want proof that this approach works, just study history. The US government used to work this way (back when our middle class and economic clout were growing) but corrupt politicians decided to outsource everything to increase the supply of kickbacks. |
|
|
There is no such consensus, and the idea that it reinforces corruption is contrary to common sense -- it's self-evident that maximum corruption bypasses specifications and public bidding altogether and just hands a contract to a politician's friend.
> If you want to prevent corruption, hire engineers directly at market rate
It's not feasible for a government to accomplish all its tasks by hiring and never by contracting. It would be incredibly wasteful because many projects are one-off, whether building a new suspension bridge or a huge new IT project. It's like saying a company should have no suppliers and write all its own software from scratch.
> just study history. The US government used to work this way
I've studied quite a bit of history thanks, and government in the US used to be quite corrupt compared to today -- just look up Tammany Hall [1] if you'd like a quick introduction. Corruption in the US has very much decreased over the past 150 years.
Outsourcing has existed as long as government has existed. I think you're confusing outsourcing as a general concept with privatization as a specific issue, which is about one-off decisions to choose to start outsourcing things that were previously done in-house. Which has its own set of pros and cons.
But no government can in-house everything. So hiring in-house is not the answer to corruption.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall