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To: Solon who wrote (11920)	5/3/2002 2:29:59 PM
From: Bill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21057

You're kidding, right? The public sector is laden with layabout hacks weaned on the inflated mammaries of taxpayers. Everybody knows that for every educated or otherwise qualified public worker, there are ten slouches. If efficiency were paramount, the government could run perfectly well on 30-40% of what they take in.

To: Solon who wrote (11920)	5/3/2002 5:35:54 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

It is not a tactic. Summarization is simply summarization. The inaccurate claim that my assertion had been discredited is the tactic. 1). Public employees often require higher level education;... Federal government employees probably are more educated and they have other advantages as you pointed out, but they work in less flexible more political systems and usually face a larger number of rules and larger paperwork requirements then employees in the private sector. So even when productivity is measured as work output per dollar or per employee/hour they may be less productive. I don't have solid information that indicates this is so. State and local employees probably have on the average a smaller amount of the advantages that you mention, but they also probably have a bit more flexibility. Adding them in complicates the comparison even more. I have enough information to reasonably suspect that the government workers are less productive when productivity is measured this way but not enough to be certain. My statements about the overall productivity of government have from the beginning relied upon the notion that a significant chunk of what the government does it useless or counterproductive. Sometimes you even have one part of government effecitvly undoing the work of another part. A). The nature of public work inherently screens for capability, character, and other predictors of productive promise; This is not even close to being true. The character that many politicians show is a perfect example of the truth being perhaps the opposite of your statements. Leaving out politicians the nature of public work doesn't inherently screen for any of these things. The public organization might screen for these things but its nothing inherent in public work. B). It is commonplace for the public sector to screen for the meeting of performance standards on an ongoing and regular basis Its not uncommon for private sector employers to do this perhaps with a less formal process but the employees are evaluated. Also you can score highly on some performance standards without actually doing anything useful. Useless paperwork requirements are a good example of this. If you do an excellent job of accurately and rapidly filling out paperwork the never gets used for anything then your not really very productive dispute your skill and dedication. Also such standards are not universally imposed in the public sector, esp. when you are considering state and local government workers. Furthermore the effort to meet these standards can itself lower productivity the process of the evaluations (including the employees self evaluation) takes up too much time and energy or if the employees change their work to meet the words of the standards rather then the spirit that motivates the standards, or if the standards are just set up poorly. I am not arguing against such standards, or that the federal state and local governments do a bad job of setting them up, or even that they might not increase the productivity of government employees; I merely state that it is not a forgone conclusion that they do greatly increase government productivity. C). There is no basis on which to denigrate and insult the productive character of any employee based on who they work for. Such stereotyping is small-minded, inaccurate, and unfair. I agree, and have never disagreed that there is no reason to denigrate and insult the character of an employee based on who they work for. Productivity might be somewhat related to character but you can have a employee of outstanding character who is unproductive and a person of low character can be very productive. Questioning how much useful work someone produces does not mean that you are attacking their character. 1). An antagonistic lack of appreciation, or an overweening animus against ALL public service is somewhat disquieting; This statement might be relevant if I had such an animus against all public service. You've said the same thing before and I have already replied to it. 2). The value of public service is not measured in wealth creation, but in public satisfaction. Your attempts to compare the value of services produced by the public and the private sectors by recourse to arguments of wealth creation, is not only in a different room--but it is in another building entirely. If a section of the government destroys a great amount of wealth then this fact is relevant to determining productivity. Also a government program only requires the satisfaction of those who benefit from it (and sometimes not even that) to cause the political process to keep it around, but if you are going to determine the productivity of the public sector based on satisfaction then you would also need to consider people's dissatisfaction with the taxes needed to pay for it and the other costs it imposes. As an example of this I would point to farm price supports. The farms and farming companies that get the subsidies might be satisfied with them, but they costs tens of billions a year, make some food more expensive in the US, and may cause a trade row with other nations which could cost billions more. The program is destructive not productive, but it lines the pockets of some people who support it, so they will continue to fight for, and probably get such massive subsidies. 3). The desirability of what is being produced in the public sector is determined by individuals; just as the desirability of what is produced in the private sector is determined by individuals; It is not determined by just one individual. One individual determines only personal value. Again to the extent that this is true it is an argument that productivity can not be measured. I think it is good to recognize that there is a subjective element in determining if work is actually useful, but I don't think it is entirely subjective. If it is considered entirely subjective then just take my posts to mean that government is less productive by my standards. Any one's post on how productive government is would have to just be according to their own standards and no one would have a reason to object to someone elses opinion on this subject. Of those (more narrowly focussed programs) which do not have a set of universal end-users, a large number of people still consider themselves to have benefited by a kinder, more compassionate, and more civilized society; a society characterized by co-operation and shared humanity, by compassion and respect for individual freedom and dignity...and by a community where the poor, the sick, and the afflicted are give the chance to be productive, while being discouraged from paths of marginalization or antisocial necessity. Many of these programs are just taking from the population at large to give to whatever special interest groups that have the best political connections. Most farm price supports go to large companies. Bush's new steel tariff will put people out of work as foreign countries retaliate against our products, and as companies that rely on steel have to cut back costs and production, and they will also cost consumers when they buy products that are made out of steel. There is nothing compassionate or respectful of freedom about these things, just political calculation by politicians and calculations about how to manipulate the system to their advantage from the companies, organizations or individuals who are receiving the subsidies. "Because buying "X-ray" glasses has no value for me, does not mean that private enterprise has no value." You copied this reference from my post. If you wish to say something about the truth value of this reference, please do so. I am not interested in chasing you from room to room. I said something very useful about it. The glasses have no value to you but they have value to the customers for such a product. Since they have no value to you, you pay nothing for them because you don't buy them. If the customers decide at some point that these things have no value then either the company will make something else or it will go out of business and no more resources will be used on an object that is no longer desired. If only a few people desire them then only a few "X-Ray" glasses will be made and only a small amount of money will be spent on them, none of which will come from you or me. However if X-Ray glasses where created by a government program the constituency that would want them made could get the government to spend many millions or billions of dollars of our tax money to subsidize their production. Most people would be paying for them even though they do not care for them. If the subsidies cause manufacturers to make too many of them the government might buy them and pay money to stockpile or destroy them undoing with one hand what it was doing with the other. But I suppose both hands would be productive by your standards since they are each doing work and each of them is made up of highly trained and educated employees with good moral character and frequent evaluations of how well they meet formal standards. That is the most STUPID statement I have heard in a long time. Is it that you hate democracy, or just that you don't have a clue?? The public sector owes its existence to supplying what is in demand. And the process is open and dynamic with continuous debate, discussion, lobbying, and media coverage. A democracy will be much more responsive to what people want then a dictatorship but much less the a free and efficient market system. Government is too big for most people to have a good idea about the details of how their tax money is spent. Are they going to vote against their local congressman because he votes for a program that they find useless and which costs them $5/year in extra taxes? Probably not. There is a strong chance that they will not even know about the program. Then when enough taxpayers complain about the taxes they pay for all of these programs the tax burden still doesn't go down much because a lot of the push for tax cuts can be deflected by the charge that such a cut will threaten the services that are valued by nearly everyone. Of course it is meaningless. The time spent on a project is the time spent. More time spent is more; less time spent is less. If you spend more time on one thing you have less to spend on something else. This lowers productivity. When you said that public employees were less productive than private employees, I responded to both the insult and the irrationality. When you ran to other rooms and started talking about wealth creation and God knows what, I took the time to politely reign in your wild ramblings and to give them some structure and coherence. There was no insult or irrationality to respond to. The "other rooms" show ways in which the government can be less productive or reasons why it is less productive. Perhaps saying the workers are less productive can confuse the issue because by some ways of measuring productivity they can be very productive even if the organization they work for isn't. The ideas I expressed are certainly debatable but they are not wild ramblings. Tim