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Private sector FTW. Please, please I hope everyone who reads this begins to understand that governments are not meant to allocate resources. The idea (promote

• epoxyhockey 14y ago
  Please don't make this a democrat/republican debate. This is the crooked way that all of our US government is spending our tax money. We need corporate money out of politics if we want to prevent these outlandish contracts from being awarded to the corporations that donate enough money to campaigns. It's not a democrat/republican or big/small government thing. It's about corruption of the system. Out of your comment, I agree most with that our government needs to help educate our children. Without an educated population, things only get worse.
  • clarky07 14y ago
    how is this not a big/small government thing? We gave away billions of dollars in a stimulus program with little to no oversight that is very clearly getting wasted here. While the republicans are certainly guilty of lots of spending and many things, democrats are clearly the party that is guilty of more spending and even bigger government.
    • _delirium 14y ago
      There are plenty of countries whose governments are far to the left of the Democrats who spend money much more wisely, so I don't see it as inherently tied. For example, the Scandinavian countries have much larger governments proportionally, but generally spend more wisely, and have more transparent bidding/provisioning of their state-funded services, so they get more service and less waste in return for their money.
      • clarky07 14y ago
        They probably do spend more wisely, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are spending on something they should be. For example in this case buying the cheaper routers would be spending more wisely, but could pretty easily be argued that this isn't something we should be spending money on. Certainly not at the federal level. Why is my tax money in Tennessee being spent on routers in WV? There are a few components to this particular screw-up. 1 is big government spending (with little oversight) and 2 is one idiot in WV with a big budget who failed miserably at spending it.
        • cantankerous 14y ago
          But it could pretty easily be argued that it's something that we should be spending money on. The existence of an argument against a course of action doesn't, on its face, preclude taking that course of action. Such a line of thinking is, well, bizarre. "1 is big government spending (with little oversight)" The obvious problem here isn't "big government" spending. It's spending without oversight. This problem occurs all the time everywhere, in sectors both public and private. To claim that private businesses are immune to this by nature of their ability to fail and thus inherently a better mechanism than government is an absolute farce. Take ownership of your government. To view the elimination of government as a solution to bad governance is both a lazy approach to problem solving and toxic to proper governing.
          • clarky07 14y ago
            Private sector isn't immune, just not as bad. Nobody said anything about elimination of government, just less of it.
      • fl3tch 14y ago
        Thank you. Finally some common sense to counter the libertarian anti-government sentiment. Whenever they tell you that government run schools are failing, ask them why the government run schools in other countries are performing so much better. Whenever they say that government can't allocate resources efficiently, point them to the governments that have balanced their budgets. It is possible. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The solution to bad government is not to abandon it, but to work ever harder to improve it. Getting the money / corporate influence out of government would be the place to start.
    • exception_code 14y ago
      democrats are clearly the party that is guilty of more spending and even bigger government. Let me guess... military spending doesn't count as "more spending". The $800 billion allocated for 10 years of stimulus is a paltry sum compared to the $700+ billion we intended to spend every year on military, and we all know that money is spent very efficiently. Meanwhile, federal spending has increased every year under both parties for the last two decades, so you don't really have a leg to stand on with regard to your "democrats are the big government spenders" FUD.
      • hedgie 14y ago
        consider this statement politically agnostic, but military spending is the closest thing we have to govt subsidized R+D in this country. there several enormously useful and successful military inventions that no commercial company would have touched. gps and the internet are two of the most notable and visible examples with astronomical infrastructure costs. no private company would undertake a risk like this yet both have substantially improved society. the microwave and digital cameras are two others that a private company may have eventually created. this isn't an argument for military spending, just the fact that without a government body that focuses entirely on applied research and development the military is the next best thing.
      • clarky07 14y ago
        Are you kidding? Look at the budgets (or lack thereof) under Bush and Obama. They aren't even in the same neighborhood. I'll be the first to agree that there is a lot of waste in defense spending. My first job was at a defense contractor working with the air force. I've seen it. Just because there is waste in defense, doesn't mean there isn't more elsewhere. Defense is one of the few things are government is actually tasked with. All the other shit we waste money on isn't part of what they are supposed to be doing. Roads and armies, that's all I expect. I don't need the government to feed me or wipe my ass.
    • epoxyhockey 14y ago
      It's not a big/small government thing because you are being played by what people told you the two party system is about, i.e. republicans are for small government and democrats are for big government. It's a bunch of bullshit. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but our current presidents and congress members do what will appease the general population in the very near term, no matter what they are supposed to do according to their party lines. They are all equally guilty of spending. You know, the TSA in the airports, which has a larger budget than the FBI? Guess who created and nurtured that entity? Your small government friends. And, who spent so much money on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it is bankrupting the country. We can't even get involved in another war right now because we simply can't afford it. It is questionable if we will ever be able to lead a war like that again, due to budget constraints. Then, we have the wall street bailouts. Which, by the way, aren't republicans supposed to be the only friends of wall street? Not if letting the banks fail mean that you are going to have to line up for the bread line tomorrow morning. The big government people aren't exactly cherubs either. How many RIAA lawyers have been appointed to the Justice Department by the current administration? I think it's 5, so far. Enjoy additional Internet censorship. Sorry to be such a downer, but things are just getting worse and the current two party system is a complete facade. I'm envious of countries like Germany that are seeing a surge in pirate party support. Unfortunately, it's going to take decades to undo this mess and, frankly, a large majority of baby boomers are going to need to expire naturally before the voting population comes back into balance.
    • adamtmca 14y ago
      As a Canadian I find the persistance of the "small vs. big" government narrative in American politics bemusing - there is no small government party in the states, only branding.
• mikescar 14y ago
  Very well said. I agree with your point that governments aren't great at allocating resources, and should concentrate on the basics. I disagree with the sidebar that it's mostly Democrats trying to take our money. Both parties do it, just with different priorities and in different ways, with all the accepted terms used to discuss it.
• jsz0 14y ago
  They wouldn't be buying any routers without the federal dollars to build fiber so it's kind of a moot point in this situation. Anyone who has worked in the private sector can tell you this type of stuff happens constantly. Too many technically ignorant people making decisions is the problem public or private. A private contractor could have sold them on the same exact package for the same reasons. Maybe even charged more for it. As for your core point about the role of government... just look at the top 10 economies of the world. Most are not libertarian paradises and they're doing OK. It seems to me both models could probably work if executed properly. I doubt one model is inherently right and one is inherently wrong. Most likely some hybrid is the best solution for everyone.
• mkramlich 14y ago
  In other news, JP Morgan just posted a $2 billion loss due to their hedge trading unit. One of the paragons of the capitalist system. Big and old and supposedly "successful" and supposedly run by very smart people who deserve very high pay because what they're doing is very hard and technical, and only they know how to manage resources efficiently, unlike say the government. Let's not even get into the paychecks of all the CEO's, traders, partners, huge sums of money for what in many cases involves just hiring other people and telling them what to do, pointing out the obvious, etc. Meanwhile the little people, the people that do the vast majority of the real and necessary work in our communities --- teachers, doctors, repairmen, cops, firefighters, road crew, waiters, delivery folks, carpenters, electricians, etc. --- get the least amount of pay. Because that's "efficient". If that's an efficient allocation of resources, maybe that's a bad thing. I think we agree on the idea that government should be small, or at least as small as possible. And we agree on the roles it should play. But I don't buy into the argument that government is inherently bad at allocating resources efficiently and private businesses are inherently good. I've seen way way too many examples that contradict the latter. I think it ultimately comes to individual situations and the choices of individuals, what information is available to them, their goals, where their financial interests pull them.
• cdavid 14y ago
  If you had worked in a big company environment, you would know that this kind of nonsense happens all the time, in both private and public environments. 30000$ routers are pocket money compared to some of the things I have seen (millions of $ spent to develop and maintain in-house software that cannot do 10 % of what a basic open source solution would do). When you reach a certain size, and you have many competing groups, all with their agenda with the same company, it becomes difficult to allocate resources correctly, especially in a domain that is not considered "core of business" (IT being a common case, sadly).
  • hedgie 14y ago
    you should see the crazy amount big companies spend on IBM tools. people pay big money for clearcase. licenses for clearcase cost enormous amounts. yet clearcase is missing many of the features found in open-source (and free) distributed version control systems. meanwhile, there is no free alternative to the routers, which may actually be necessary at some of the installed locations. this doesn't include the huge server costs to run clearcase after you buy the license, which aren't necessary for distributed version control systems like git or mercurial. and big companies often spend more money buying other IBM tools to integrate for which free alternatives exist... the amount of money spent on this purchase is fucking peanuts compared to what many large private sector companies spend on IBM software that lacks most of the features found in your favorite open-source alternative.