Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Stupid theory (or politics) questions

Orr> I can speak to this one from having worked both in government and in the private sector.

In practice, there are two entities that may be involved in the answer to your question - the government, and the private contractor.

First, with respect to the government providing services: In my experience, most government employees are pretty useless, with the occasional exceptional group. The general conservative argument is that this uselessness arises from the fact the it's difficult to fire a government employee for unproductivity, incompetence, or just about anything else that would get you shoved out the door at a private company. In general, I think that this is true, based upon my experience.

I have found government contractors to be, in general, even more useless than regular government employees. The strategy of the average government contracting firm is to establish itself in a position where it will be able to suck the maximum amount of money from the public coffers for an unlimited period of time. This is usually done with a clever, two-pronged attack. First, the contractor requires that the contract be specified in minute detail. Since the individuals handing out the contract are often clueless, the contract that gets awarded inevitably specifies the production of a good or service that is not actually what is needed. The contractor then completes the job to the specifications in the quickest and most slipshod manner possible. When the government sees the finished product and says, "That's not what we wanted!" the contractor then points out that they fulfilled their end of the bargain according to the letter of the contract, and that it will cost a bunch of money to correct things. Correcting things of course means another contract, with the corrections specified in exacting detail. Wash, rinse, repeat. The second prong of the attack is that if the government attempts to change contractors, the new contractor who has to pick up the pieces left by the old on inevitably discovers what a mess things are and so throws everything out and starts from scratch. You can see where this is going.

The theory, which is usually espoused by those who are more familiar with ethical, or at the very least efficient public companies (as opposed to government contractors) is that most workers in the government are indeed so useless
that a private company can do the job so much cheaper and better that there are real cost savings. Unfortunately, since those people handing out the contracts are useless, and government contractors are fundamentally leeches, the whole system simply becomes a money-shuffling game for enriching lobbyists and their contractor clients at the public expense.

I don't know if a solution to this problem even exists. If there were some way to keep the unethical hogs from the public trough, there might be some hope, but I just don't see it. Being able to fire incompetent government workers would be a start.