Government Just Can't Manage People. Everything Else Works Great

When Illinois Governor Quinn or Chicago Mayor Emanuel try to get their workers to work more efficiently to cut costs once, which is what every private company constantly does, they meet a brick wall of resistance from unions - middlemen who resist improvements - or change of any kind. A great example is the article, how-many-city-workers-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb. The short answer is 3, which is three times as many as the private sector operating across the street from them.

It has been argued that the solution to this is to employ subcontractors from the private sectors. But here they run into problems too, pentagon-push-to-cut-contractors-takes-toll-on-businesses. They tried that and found it costs them less to do it themselves. One criticism in the article is that they even fail to properly evaluate the savings when making the switch. So it's not just poor management of workers. It's a lack of basic understanding about what they are doing, whether they are succeeding or failing.

Let's see, it costs them three times as much as private industry to do a job themselves. But it costs even more than than to hire subcontractors. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The common thread in these two cases is they are managing somebody. Maybe they are just not cut out for that. It is worrying that the even bigger job of managing the country is going to them. One does notice that myriad regulations promoted by special interests continue to find their way into the national agenda and impact every citizen, far too often in a net negative way. The Climategate scam comes to mind and one can quickly list half a dozen others, with more time, a thousand others. But let us not digress. Let's focus on the people they pay do get work done.

Whether a direct workforce or subcontractors, they do it very expensively to taxpayers. They can't eliminate waste. They can't control it much at all. It seems the only solution is to make government as small as possible so that when they do waste, that too is as small as possible.