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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (12581)	5/10/2002 12:49:11 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

"The inaccurate claim that my assertion had been discredited is the tactic" Nonsense, I provided a summary to prove it. You provided a summary of your points but you proved nothing. "This is not even close to being true" Certainly, it is. Public service is subject to public scrutiny at several levels--both formally and informally. Often the scrutiny is extremely mild. Congress deals with the budget for a whole department in one bill. Sometimes multiple departments or even the whole government are combined in to one budget bill when time is running short. The amount of scrutiny one program provided by one subsection of one office in one department gets is often almost non-existant. Sorry, when you insult the productivity of all workers in Government departments, you are assaulting their usefulness, value, character, and competence. I am not talking about the productivity of each individual, but rather the system they work in. I am saying nothing about their charecter, competence, or value as a person, but I am saying the jobs that some of them do are not very useful. You have made innumerable accusations I haven't accused public workers of anything. I have said the system that they work in makes them less efficient, thats not an accusation that they have done anything wrong. but you have not produced one fact to support your acusations. I've given the example of the post office. More recently (after your post that I am now replying to) I posted about the Pentagon not being able to account for an incredible sum of money. But the inefficancy is of the system as a whole. Everyone involved could have nothing that they can be accused of (and so no facts to back up the accusations) but the useful work that gets done for the resources expended is lower then it should be because the political discipline that governments face is normally less effective then market discipline. "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." Again, you start a paragraph of unfounded accusations which suggests that your accusations could apply to any public program. Thus, you tarnish everyone; but you name nobody. Wrong. I have named during this conversation, corperate welfare (and more particuarly Archer Daniels Midland recieving a lot of it), agricultural subsidies and trade barriers such as the barriers at sugar that favor a few politically connected American sugar growers at the expense of consumers, and of the lower cost producers overseas. We don't let them sell us stuff for money but then we give them aid (sending them money for nothing is apparently ok). I also mentioned the steel tarrifs that Bush has signed off on. But my point isn't as much these particuarly bad examples of this but the fact that this is how government works. Politically favored special interests have and always have had an advantage. I don't think this fact can be changed but it does mean that government programs are not always based on the desires of the people, and often can act against the desires and the interests of the people. The check on this is that if these programs get so bad as to be intolerable they can be cut or reformed or eliminated, but things usually have to get pretty bad before people even notice the problem let alone consider it intolerable. "If you spend more time on one thing you have less to spend on something else. This lowers productivity." No, it doesn't. Productivity is not synonymous with variety. IF you have 5 jobs to get done, and you spend all your time getting the first two done then you don't get all the work done. If you can do the first two quicker and you then have time to get all five done you are more productive. Tim