3 ms·
That's not necessarily true, it depends how inefficient the government is. for example, in my city the city controls trash pickup and tried to social engineer m
by snapplebobapple 3y ago
That's not necessarily true, it depends how inefficient the government is. for example, in my city the city controls trash pickup and tried to social engineer more composting/recycling by cutting trash pickup days to once every two weeks instead of every week. A private enterprise has sprung up offering the second pickup for the same price the city charges. They are able to provide that in the vastly less efficient setup of only a few people on each block using them, the city being dicks and not letting them collect from the city provided trash cans, etc. That tells you for this service the correct thing for the city to do is fire all the inefficient people they are employing and support private enterprise in gaining the efficiencies from automation and a bigger market and providing an even lower cost service. I suspect there are tons of services the city provides that are extremely inefficient as above.
- dubcee349 3y agoThey probably don't pay living wages. Its easy to be cheap when you don't pay living wages.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoThere's no such thing as a living wage because no matter what price you set labor at someone will fail at living there, be pointed to as an excuse to further manipulate the labor market. All there really is is the value at which the labor market clears. That they seem to have no problem providing the service at the price they are says they are paying at or above the price that would clear the labor market so there's nothing to talk about other than the government clearly overpaying, perhaps in the pursuit of a frankly stupid idea such as a living wage that is never clearly defined, constantly ratcheted higher when whatever number was mentioned previously fails to end poverty, and of which the only thing economic theory can say for certain is if the living wage price is set below the market clearing price of labor it will be ignored and if it is set above the market clearing price of labor it will cause unemployment and dead weight loss to society making it utterly ridiculous. The whole talk of this stupid idea honestly detracts from real discussion about real problems in the labor market interfering with actually making things better (i.e. the rampant monopsony and general geographic market power at the low to mid end of the employment market, the abuse of non competes at the mid to high end, etc.)