Not sure what you mean. I said that private enterprise can do almost anything government can do more efficiently and cost-effectively because of the nature of free market competition dynamics. Governments are typically bloated and inefficient precisely because they do not have to compete and therefor have no impetus to economize. The recognition of this characteristic of government and an attempt to control it is seen in the many and increasing instances of local governments outsourcing public services to private industry that's required to bid on the service and can be dumped for another vendor if the service doesn't meet the required standards at the agreed-upon price. The amounts of taxpayer money that can be saved by doing so is staggering.piscator wrote:See Seth, a government isn't a retail store engaged in marketeering. It's a flawed rhetorical analogy to denigrate our country and the good things it stands for into some flea market of consumerism. At minimum, it dishonors those who gave their lives to the American Ideal.
That's why I can't buy into the Rush Limbaugh "Needs of the marketplace" line of manure futures.
But by all means feel "free" to engage in whatever sort of rhetorical penis polishing you desire.
The lack of competition in government is exactly why every non-Marxist economist argues that public employee unions should never be allowed to exist because the idea of a public employee negotiating with other public employees about how much of the taxpayer's money public employees are going to get is an inherent conflict of interest that can quite literally destroy a city's economy. The absolute proof of this is found in Detroit, which is declaring bankruptcy because public employees gave other public employees benefits packages that were absolutely unsustainable and they created them in ways that kept City Hall from cutting pensions and benefits when the system started to crash.
Government has a few essential functions that only it can perform properly and safely, but it's a small number of things and the costs involved are always higher than they would be in a free market environment, but we put up with these necessary evils because there is no good free market solution. The military is the prime example. We put up with the waste, fraud and bloat in the military as a necessary evil because managing the military is an essential function of government for many reasons. Hiring mercenaries on a per-job basis would be much, much cheaper and more cost-effective because mercenaries don't fuck around when they go to work because time is money and the competition of the free market induces them to be as brutally efficient as possible in winning the assigned conflict. The reason we don't use mercenaries is social and political, not economic. We want a standing army that is under the control of the People, and we want to be able to dictate the rules of engagement as required by international politics, so that the threat of force can be effectively used as a deterrent without creating a despotic military junta that runs everything for its own benefit.
There are other values that factor in to how we constitute our military other than simple cost effectiveness, and that is true of a few other functions such as law enforcement, fire fighting, emergency services and legislation. But the vast majority of what's done by the federal government today is entirely suitable for private enterprise or for devolving the regulatory authority to the states themselves.
And the point of denigrating central control and central planning is because it does not and cannot work, as we see in nearly everything Obama does, with the shining achievement in failed Marxist policy being Obamacare. No single bureaucrat, or legion of bureaucrats can possibly predict and properly price all of the millions of things the public needs and wants. The beauty of the free market is that it's self-regulating and it's regulated by the billions upon billions of individual decisions and transactions that direct the market towards the needs of the people. To anticipate the favorite canard of liberals, this does NOT mean an "unregulated" market. "Free market" means free of government interference in the buying and selling decisions of consumers and the manufacturing and distribution decisions of businesses. It means not allowing the government to dictate who will sell what at what price to whom or who will be a politically-motivated winner or loser in the economy. It does NOT mean prohibiting the government from exercising its police power to ensure fair trading by punishing theft and fraud and the like.
Go read "The Road to Serfdom" for the definitive debunking of central planning.
You're going to have to explain what "American ideal" you are referring to for me to reply cogently to that point I'm afraid.
