11 ms·

Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people m

• hypeatei 2y ago
  > These people must have never worked at a large corporation Efficiency isn't the point, the point is funneling more money to themselves and their friends.
  • cmorgan31 2y ago
    Yup, those with capital are the only ones positioned during times of chaos to take advantage of the situation.
  • lesuorac 2y ago
    Happens in large corporations too. Purchases of companies owned the CEO / brother. Mother hiring their children to high internal positions.
    • hypeatei 2y ago
      I was referring to the oligarchs that are running the current US administration. They want to defund the government, make it shitty, and then say the only option to make it better is privatize.
  • fire_lake 2y ago
    Efficiency is not resilient. Supply chains were efficient before Covid and look what happened. Efficiency is a non-goal for government. I’m surprised that DOGE engineers (who presumably have deployed a load balancer or two) don’t understand this.
    • sgarland 2y ago
      > I’m surprised that DOGE engineers (who presumably have deployed a load balancer or two) don’t understand this. You're surprised that the same geniuses who launched a site with an obvious exploit don't understand something about infrastructure? I'm more surprised that they haven't done something like rewriting a critical system in JS (with AI, obviously).
    • atq2119 2y ago
      You're overestimating the average competence of engineers. Besides, this is one of those situations where ideology easily trumps reason.
    • delecti 2y ago
      The DOGE engineers are Musk sycophants, and Musk is tearing apart the government so he and other oligarchs can profit off the unmet needs. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/business/elon-musk-faa-air-traffic-control-failing-spacex/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/business/elon-musk-faa-air-tr...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• davidw 2y ago
  > Any large organization of humans Yes, well said. Also, when you are serious about trying to make it more efficient, you need to understand how things work and why and what incentives are in place and how that relates to what the stated purpose is, and a bunch of other things. You can't come in and make random cuts over the course of a few days and expect things to go well.
• noobermin 2y ago
  Having worked at large organisations and governments, they are literally the same. This is so obvious if you've ever had first hand experience of them. I think this is a great example of how a lot of people, even supposed "intellectuals" think with thought-terminating cliches and ideology, because the narrative of gov'ts being inefficient has been a talking point and narrative since Reagan whilst all the time any large corporation or organisation in general has the same type of inertia but somehow no one makes the broad generalisation about both of them. It's even harder to reach a certain type of "thinker" or "skeptic" who sees such a dividing line between private orgs and governmental orgs because they already style themselves as being critical or intellectual.
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    > Having worked at large organisations and governments, they are literally the same. What do you make of all the people arguing that governments and corporations are not the same, and that what works in one won’t work in the other? This feels like the opposite of that argument.
  • ThinkBeat 2y ago
    Having spent many years at government at different levels and in large companies as a consultant I disagree with a lot of that. Some government entities are great, really efficient, some seem nearly like startups. Some are nearly all deadweight. A majority of the senior older folks working for in one of the state governments, would eat breakfast, read the newspaper, have lunch, and then try to do something for a couple of hours before going home. I was rather shocked. I was less so when I encountered it in other places. The government is an enormous group of entities. Some work well, most I think work ok, and some are horrors. (from a taxpayer perspective, not from the people who work there s perspective) There is a lot of dead weight in the private sector. The worst examples I have encountered are places where nepotism is king. Older companies seem to accrue dead weight over time. Especially with strong unions¹, But at some point some new CEO or some such makes attempts to clean house, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I am a huge supporter of unions and I think they are one of the only ways to try to get the US back on track again if enough people are unionized. BUt that is not a silver bullet either.
• enlightenedfool 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • bayindirh 2y ago
    The thing you see as waste from outside might be the most efficient system possible given the consequences and tons of time it had for evolving. These systems contain huge icebergs of knowledge gained, refined and organized over time. Rooting them like weeds which grow in three days flat is a huge mistake.
    • enlightenedfool 2y ago
      Well, let’s find that with DOGE. DOGE had already revealed things that are so unnecessary for a government to do. Humans can do much better governance than what we do now.
      • bayindirh 2y ago
        DOGE is working like a governing board which landed on top of a big corporation, and started reaping things down without understanding "why" part of the equation. Ignoring Chesterton's Fences in the short term might look good on paper, but we have seen how companies enshittified themselves for profits (let's reduce the OPEX part). Doing this to a government will have catastrophic results, and we will watch the slow downfall. It'll be dramatic and painful.
      • iterateoften 2y ago
        > let’s find that with DOGE. I think this whole logic of letting an unproven entity come in and destroy a working system to just “find out” if it works is negligent and malicious.
    • dcow 2y ago
      I cannot accept that sending 100B to an NGO where 90-95B ends up in politicians’ pockets and 10-5% ends up as actual aid or whatever is the most efficient system.
• blactuary 2y ago
  Yes, this exactly. Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda. Govt is just people, and people are flawed and have competing incentives. I've worked in massive companies that have incredibly dumb inefficiencies.
  • mexicocitinluez 2y ago
    > Govt is just peoples Which is the original definition of the "Deep state" until it was hijacked by conspiracy theorists and Republicans who do bad shit.
  • cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Reagan or not, what you can see clearly in the comments here and many other places is that what would be considered fairly extreme libertarian talking points have become common parlance these days. Taxation as "theft", the necessity of the threat of termination and other economic deprivation in order to coerce people to doing good work, the assumption that profit inevitably produces more efficiency, and that efficiency (as defined monetarily) is the ultimate goal. These are defensible positions based on various world views, but they should not be accepted automatically. But I see here and other places people speaking as if this is just "obvious fact." This was not the case in the past. Civic duty, the need for a functioning civil service, the notion of a commonwealth and/or social contract, etc are all foundational notions coming out of the enlightenment and were at least formerly mainstream. The Ayn Rand types have always been around. And they're welcome to their positions. I'm concerned about how we get here now that this is a default position for people to take in North American society. I certainly don't agree with it. And I suspect if you force the majority of "mainstream" people to go through the arguments piece by piece, they wouldn't either. I'd also argue that decades of corroding the public service's effectiveness through economic and ideological warfare has in fact made the public service look like exactly the thing its enemies claim it is. If you make the civil sector into a partisan battle, and play games with its funding, and spread cynicism about its motives... surprise you're going to get a partisan, inefficient, and cynical public service.
    • mopsi 2y ago
• dcow 2y ago
  The way you combat the creep of bureaucratic miasma is by regularly turning a critical eye inward. At least private organizations perform regular layoffs. At least private organizations are accountable to shareholders. The government is accountable to citizens and citizens voted for this. Yes, it’s disruptive. That’s the point.
  • davepeck 2y ago
    > The way you combat the creep of bureaucratic miasma is by regularly turning a critical eye inward It certainly can’t hurt. Alas for the current moment, but it seems the eye we’re turning inward is as far from “critical” as can be.
    • dcow 2y ago
      I keep seeing this argument. Can you help me understand what parts are serving a hidden agenda?
      • davepeck 2y ago
        Who said anything about a hidden agenda? Can you consider that the current efforts are outright foolish?
        • dcow 2y ago
          I disagree that trying to curb “fraud waste and abuse” is an outfight foolish endeavor, no.
          • davepeck 2y ago
            There are effective approaches to curbing fraud waste and abuse and ineffective or even damaging approaches. Which do you believe the current administration is engaged in?
            • dcow 2y ago
• luckylion 2y ago
  My experience as a consultant with both (local) administrations (in Germany) and much larger corporations is that the corporations weren't even close to being as dysfunctional. I'm certain there are great parts of government, but I've never experienced it, and all I'm hearing from friends who work at the federal level is that it's no different there.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    Germany ain't the US. Organizational culture in one might be different than the other.
    • luckylion 2y ago
      I'm sure they are. Yet the arguments for why government is doing just fine and large corporations are at least as bad are very similar, so there seem to be some similarities as well.
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        > so there seem to be some similarities as well. Any similarity is only at the surface level, because the entire corpora of case law, administrative procedure acts, and past rulings are going to cause entirely distinct dysfunctions. Both Gonorrhea and the Plague create bubous, but their causes and cures are entirely different. It's the same with reforming organizational culture.
        • luckylion 2y ago
          And yet the organizational outcomes are surprisingly similar when you zoom in. Maybe culture is the only thing that matters and incentives don't at all, but I doubt it.
    • skissane 2y ago
      I think many of the factors which can make public sector entities less efficient - e.g. harder to get rid of underperforming employees, fewer institutional rewards for reducing unnecessary expenditures - apply broadly across countries. I think something Germany and the US have in common, compared to many other countries, is less blatant corruption in government, due to strong laws against it.
• jisnsm 2y ago
  It’s very easy. Waste in private organisations costs the owners money and the organisation disappears when the money runs out. Waste in public organisations costs all of us, including me, money, and the organisation never disappears, if anything, it keeps growing and consuming more money forever. If Mark Cuban wants to spend his money on this I don’t see the issue. It’s his to waste.
  • blactuary 2y ago
    This is incredibly simplified Econ 101 style thinking though, it is nowhere near that simple and our markets are often incredibly inefficient. It's also not true that the organization never disappears. The government functions across all sorts of areas, and departments change or are eliminated all the time.
  • thrance 2y ago
    And who will buy the newly privatized 18f's products? The government. It's back to square one except now there are shareholders in the middle and the government (you) doesn't own its code anymore. A strictly worse state of affairs.
    • jisnsm 2y ago
      Not necessarily. The government will have several providers to choose from, which will have to compete in price. If the prices are still inflated, we are talking government corruption, which is yet another reason to make the government smaller, not bigger.
      • hello_moto 2y ago
        That's not how govt contract works. Repeat providers will win almost all contracts because they know how to navigate the "red tapes" and they know the inner people. Competition? lol...
        • jisnsm 2y ago
          I am very aware of this, which is why I mentioned corruption in my comment, and how the only solution is to make the government smaller. Should have read the comment to the end.
• cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  There is at the root here an ideological presupposition that profit (and competition) is the only real motivation that produces quality or efficiency. Community service as a motivation is actually extremely strong, but becoming more and more invisible in public discourse. With expected results. Which is strange from a nation that is constantly proclaiming its "Christian" foundations? I have many friends (and a spouse!) who take lower compensation packages so they can work in non-profit or government or other areas where they personally feel they are obtaining some meaning. I can assure you they work damn hard without fear of "competition." (EDIT: There are frankly other presuppositions about the nature of private vs public funding and what taxation means/is, but they end up in pointless controversial discussions or downvote fests that I have no interest in getting into this morning...)
  • dcow 2y ago
    They shouldn’t be taking pay cuts, for one. The government should be paying competitively and fairly.
    • nobodyandproud 2y ago
      How would this happen? More taxes? More government bonds to increase the national debt (an irresponsible, conservative favorite)?
      • dcow 2y ago
        When you cut out fraud waste and abuse you can actually reduce spend while increasing individual pay.
        • nobodyandproud 2y ago
          That assumes: 1. There is meaningful fraud or waste to cut out. 2. That the goal-post won’t be moved, to squeeze more savings. 3. That the methods that lead to inefficiencies aren’t being repeated. 4. That redundancies are a “waste”. Just in time supply chains are terrible in a disaster, for example. And everything I’ve seen in the past 50 years and especially in the past month strongly indicate more long-term inefficiencies.
• modeless 2y ago
  The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The exception is companies propped up by government regulation. The problem with modern big companies is that the exception has become the rule. Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failure by the government. Seemingly beneficial regulations create barriers to entry that prevent dysfunctional companies from being replaced. IP law, even copyright (in its current, out-of-control practically perpetual form) is regulation that protects large incumbents in media and tech and other sectors from competition.
  • suddenlybananas 2y ago
    Delusion belief in market forces that completely ignores the reality when companies reach monopoly status.
    • airstrike 2y ago
      Even if that were true, by definition not every company reaches monopoly status, so all others can fail too, unlike the government, so this argument against the GP's claim does not hold.
    • modeless 2y ago
      We have antitrust law for that. But antitrust law today is simply overwhelmed by the huge number of monopolies and oligopolies the government has created in almost every sector. And courts don't have the power to correct the problem by reducing the regulations that protected the monopolies in the first place, making their remedies temporary.
      • Volundr 2y ago
        I agree with the first part of your statement but disagree quite strongly with the idea that the government created them. Monopolies and oligopolies are the natural product of unchecked capitalism. Without government activily enforcing antitrust and breaking up monopolies you naturally end up with companies having a stranglehold on their sector.
• alephnerd 2y ago
  Amen, I have a lot of respect for the amount of work federal agencies do despite constantly being stymied by political leadership. Imo and ime, much of the bloat that exists in the federal service is becuase of legislative and executive pork barrel politics that drastically expands mission scope with no equivalent increase in resources, forcing these agencies to have to resort to semi-privatized solutions. There can and is a healthy way to manage public-private relations but the DOGE model is obviously wrong.
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  I agree that large organizations work similarly in government and business. The difference is that large businesses constantly competed by other businesses. This either keeps them effective enough to compete, or they get replaced with more functional ones. The accumulated dysfunction in a 20-50 year old company is large, but on a whole different scale than a 250 year old government.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    > that large businesses constantly competed by other businesses and either Not exactly. Ideally, you want to use market and persona segmentation to develop a partial oligopoly. The nature of sales cycles and the fact that only a minority of organizations (F1000) represent the majority of spend, means that you essentially have 2-3 large players in an single segment, and maybe a couple smaller players that will eventually be acquired.
    • BurningFrog 2y ago
      2-3 large players and a few smaller ones is a decent amount of competition. Vastly more than a government has. Oligopols are less competition than ideal, but much better than nothing.
• hk1337 2y ago
  I key difference and qualifier is a private company CAN have the same amount of waste but not necessarily and like modeless mentioned, private companies can fail and we can move the services to another. It's guaranteed the federal government is going to have waste and be very difficult to change because you cannot let it fail.
  • LocalH 2y ago
    Why do we need to stamp out "waste"? A bit of waste is inevitable, and is human. Excessive waste, sure. But I think Musk's DOGE goal is to stamp out all waste to 0, and that is simply impossible. For example, the only way not to waste any food whatsoever, is not to eat. It is inevitable there will be some small portion of food wasted. Chasing perfect efficiency is a fool's errand, since humans are not perfect.
    • shinryuu 2y ago
      Also where some people see waste, other see redundancy and slack in the system, which creates resilience.
• skissane 2y ago
  > There will be inept people, waste, corruption, people stealing, etc. but there will also be the vast majority trying to do a good job and feel satisfaction in their work. It doesn't matter if its the federal government or a private corporation, its simply a trade-off of the organization structure. Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people, and because there is a stronger incentive to do so - reducing salary/wage expenditure increases profit. Yes there will always be some in both, but having worked in both public and private sectors, you see more of it in the public sector. A few days ago I was talking to the employees of a homelessness charity at a social event, one of whom was telling me he felt NGOs waste money more than for-profit businesses, but not as much as the public sector. The reason he said it, was his employer was still paying rent on an office building despite it being uninhabitable due to mould and water damage - my question was if the building was uninhabitable why not cancel the lease, surely that would give justifiable grounds to do so, and then they’d have more money to spend on the homeless (or, he added, pay their employees more)
  • mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
    > Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people. Its not though, its the same layers of documentation, paperwork, upper management approvals, legal and HR approvals. The only exception being blatant policy violations like drug use, etc. where immediate dismissal can be done. If you are talking about mass layoffs, for large corporations they still have to file paperwork for the WARN act, look at laws in various states around employment, get legal, HR, etc. involved. I've seen both mass layoff and single individual layoff first hand and the only thing that might be different with Federal employees is a union. And in that case a union operates mostly the same if its serving a large corp or a government entity.
    • skissane 2y ago
      Government employees have greater legal rights to challenge their termination than private sector employees do.
  • foldr 2y ago
• CooCooCaCha 2y ago
  I think you're right, but I think there's a deeper connective tissue here. Nobody likes bureaucracy, waste, pointless meetings, layers of management, etc. so why does this happen? I think the answer is people create these things to protect something, to feel safe. So I think these things are inevitable with any large group of people with scarcity. The capitalist/libertarian solution is to remove protections so people cannot create inefficient systems as they will be destroyed through marketplace competition. At least that's what they hope for. The first problem with this solution is people will always find a way to suppress competition, especially if the guardrails are removed. And secondly, this actually doubles down on the source of the problem. It makes people feel less safe. Personally, I find inspiration in open source. Is it perfectly free of bureaucracy? No. But because the profit motive is de-emphasized in open source people actually do walk away when faced with BS which is exactly what the capitalists are trying to achieve. In other words, when people's safety isn't dependent on something they are more likely to not put up with corporate/government style bureaucratic BS. That's why I'm a fan of safety nets and why I think a safe society where people are provided for is the future, not doubling down on this darwinian, survival of the fittest type environment that the USA (at least the people in power here) seem to be pushing for.
• lossolo 2y ago
  As part of cost-cutting efforts, the U.S. government outsourced military logistics and supply chain management to private contractors like KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary). Instead of the military running the system at cost, private companies added profit margins, and the price of everyday goods—including soda—increased significantly. KBR and other contractors billed the government enormous sums for logistics and operations, including running dining facilities, supply chains, and retail operations. Reports showed waste, overcharging, and inefficiencies, with some contractors billing the U.S. military $45 for a six-pack of soda in extreme cases due to inflated supply chain costs.
• tsunego 2y ago
  Privatization isn't about eliminating human flaws but accountability and incentives. Private corporations face real consequences if they're inefficient: customers leave, profits drop, and they eventually fail. Government agencies, funded by taxpayers without alternatives, rarely face such direct pressures.
  • hypeatei 2y ago
    That is a feature, not a bug. Government is our safety net which has catastrophic consequences when it fails. If you have issues with certain programs or funding, then that is handled by congress NOT the executive.
• pseudocomposer 2y ago
  We’ve had it all along: small businesses and city/county governments. What we’re missing is a willingness/ability to break up overreaching corporations and states. We used to be better about it - see 19th-century Europe, especially France - but fighting back obviously has costs. Centralized power isn’t great at supporting human life, but it’s very good at dominating human life. So large corporations and states have been bedfellows and dominated us for the last century or so by greatly elevating the cost of actually fighting back against their united power.
• mightybyte 2y ago
  There's a spectrum of efficiency/redundancy choices an organization can make. On one (theoretical) end of the spectrum the organization maximally leverages each individual's unique skills/knowledge. This is the most efficient part of the spectrum. On the other end every person is an interchangeable cog. This is the most resilient but also least efficient part of the spectrum. Small organizations usually skew much more to the efficiency end of the spectrum because they typically have significant resource constraints. As an organization grows, more people depend on its existence, and my observation has been that resilience and self preservation typically become more important than efficiency. This phenomenon is not unique to governments, it happens in all kinds of organizations.
• api 2y ago
  "If you want to turn someone into an anti-government laissez faire capitalist, send them to work for the Fed for a few years. If you want to turn someone into a communist, send them to work on Wall Street for a few years." Someone who used to work in finance told me that once. Humans are very, very bad at large scale organizational efficiency. I have never seen a very large organization that is not an absolute disaster in terms of waste. The relationship seems to be exponential as a function of organizational size. There's an extra wrinkle with government though: I am not sure we want government to be too efficient. Government has a monopoly on force. Making it into a bureaucratic tar pit is one time tested way to restrain it and make sure it's subject to proper checks. The cost is high, but the cost of a runaway murderous regime is higher.
• abeppu 2y ago
  I think it does matter whether the work is done by the federal government or private corporations. While their dysfunctions as large organizations may be similar, when they're successful, they behave very differently. The goal of any profit seeking company selling to the government is to extract as much value as possible. The goal is not just to provide X service which was initially requested at a price that undercuts your competition. The goal is to win the contract for X for year 1, and then to under-deliver it in a way that the customer is basically forced to buy X for year 2, because it would be a massive lift to shift to a different service, but probably the customer needs to buy Xv2 to actually accomplish anything and by the way Xv2 works best if you also buy services Y and Z. Perhaps you do some "study" to determine that actually the problem is larger than what the customer initially described and several other expensive problems must be tackled to fully solve it. Efficient use of tax-dollars to solve the problem within the scope described is not the goal of government contractors. These companies grade themselves based on their revenue and margins, not on what they deliver to the tax payers. They're profit-seeking companies and they do just that. By contrast, when government agencies are working well, they do what they're chartered to do by Congress. Whether that goal is good or not may be a matter of perspective (e.g. do we need a separate SEC and CFTC and CFPB? Could there be a single financial products/services regulator?) but to the degree their stated missions are incoherent, that's at least partly a failure of Congress, which the people have an indirect way of correcting.
• rglullis 2y ago
  I've gotten used to say that Capitalism is not the problem, but Corporatism. We "just" need to switch from monolithic institutions and switch to limited-scale "microservices". Limit the size of any corporation to at most 150 employees and and forbid any single individual to own/manage/take a seat in the board of directors for more than one company. Even if inefficiencies might even still be there (because large corporations are able to optimize some process and they can have loss leaders), I can bet the net result will be more transparency, less waste and (most importantly) less chances of billionaires using their wealth to disrupt governments.
• tchock23 2y ago
  This is exactly the issue. The minute a group of humans gets too large you face the same challenges, regardless of whether it is public or private.
• armchairhacker 2y ago
  Both public and private are means to an end. Privatization is better than nothing. If what it takes to ensure research and public services continue, is moving them from government to states and corporations, so be it. In fact, that may be the way out of our horrible partisan divide. The right gets what they want, a shrunken government and ability to enforce their ideology in red states, except they can't control what happens in blue states. The left gets to no longer feel threatened and enforce their ideology in blue states, except they can't control what happens in in red states. What's left of the government resolves interstate disputes and maintains interstate services, though many formerly-interstate services become intrastate (e.g. USPS). The military protects everyone from foreign adversaries. The US doesn't devolve into anarchy. I suspect that's not what either side wants, but honestly, what's the alternative? Domination, where a large section the population is miserable and angry? Anarchy, where everyone (who can't leave the US at least) suffers? AI superintelligence (I'm skeptical)? Or perhaps the majority left's and majority right's beliefs aren't fundamentally incompatible, and everything seems polarized now, but after some things start breaking and others not breaking, time passes, some people feel betrayed or upset, but the government doesn't collapse, the "average left" and "average right" will be able to respectfully debate each other again. That's what I hope, but I suspect it ends as described above (maybe once people start living in their own ideological areas, the debates are so respectful they wonder why they can't compromise and merge, but when merged they're too emotional to debate or compromise).
• throw0101c 2y ago
  > Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. Somehow I doubt that external consultants will be cheaper than in-house government employees. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the US needs more bureaucracy: * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-... As to waste, Reagan tried to find it, bringing in the private sector: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission * https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/presidents-private-sector-survey-cost-control-grace-commission https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/president... * https://www.gao.gov/products/123531 https://www.gao.gov/products/123531 * https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/convening-experts/expert-views/fiscal-commission/fiscal-commissions-promises-and-disappointments/ https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/convening-experts... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463355 * As did Bush (43): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_General_on_Integrity_and_Efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene... * FDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee * Truman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission * Clinton/Gore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinventing_Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv... There's an entire agency whose job is auditing: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
• asimpletune 2y ago
  Yeah, I have to say, I heard so much growing up, from adults, always saying stuff about how they want the government “run like a business”. Now that I’m grown, and I’ve seen the various pathologies of businesses first hand, I question whether any of those people really understood their meaning. Just off the top of my head here’s a list of what that it means to run something like a business: enshitification, make everything a subscription, policies implemented by bots that can not be appealed, dark pattern UI, force people to give up their data by saying it’s necessary and then sell their data, train AI on copyrighted data if it means a snowball’s chance in hell that you can fire your employees, but do this only after spending decades harassing people who think there should essentially be a global library (call it “piracy!”), customer’s don’t own or control their devices, make healthcare about profit, give bailouts to businesses that simply were bad at their core competencies, and I could go on… so could anyone else on HN. The truth is there is simply more to life than the bottom line, but that no longer stands to be the case when you run the country like a business… because that is the point of the business (the bottom line). Regardless, even if you believe the contrary, that there is nothing else in life beyond the bottom line, then the question remains at how many businesses are simply awful at what they purport to do. Why anyone would want to exchange the system that has created the most prosperous nation in history for the likes of those who can only compete by not charging for their product is beyond my comprehension. Something tells me though that the issue at hand is not that we, as in the USA, are lacking in prosperity but something deeper and that’s the real reason why everyone’s searching for change. I won’t be the one to say what it is, as I’d much rather hear what other people think, but I do want to beg the question. Perhaps there is a deeper problem, and perhaps we’re being guided to embrace a solution that will actually make things much worse for most.
• elif 2y ago
  yep agree 100%. i think around 80 people is where individual accountability starts to fall off and people make self interested decisions they sense they can get away with in the context of the larger group dynamics.
• AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  The assumption is that privatization saves money, but that only happens in instances of free market competition. That's not what governmental privatization is, instead it is the government handing a company a monopoly. At least monopolies in the "open" market are subject to absolute price limits by customers. That's not what happens in government. They can be as inefficient as they want, and the government will fund them with "unlimited" pockets, and then they can pay a couple hundred thousand to key senators and they are home free. At least public institutions are subject to the inherent competition between right and left wing.