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

To: Solon who wrote (12614)	5/10/2002 2:45:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

The summary was the proof. It doesn't even vaguely resemble proof. That is untrue. The scrutiny is intense. That is why we are so aware of mismanagement, fragmentation, duplication Which is why the Pentagon can lose a trillion dollars over a number of years with no one finding out about it until years later and no one being sure what exactly happened to it. (and so far with no one found to be accountable for the whole mess). The scrutiny of a major new program is intense, but the scrutiny of old ones is far less and of small ones it can be close to zero. Also even the scrutiny of major new programs often has little to do with the efficiency of the program. Whatever the requirements of the job one is doing...doing it productibvely means doing it to completion or to standard. It does not matter to a lawyer that he is not also a surgeon. Productivity is evaluated by what is being done, not by how much time is left to spend on other things. If it takes you twice as long to do part of your job, then the total that is done is less. If a lawyer is dealing with two cases and the legal brief for one case that should take him 5 hours to prepare instead takes three days, so that he has to do a shoddy thrown together brief for another case then his lack of productivity in writing the brief can cost his clients and possibly his firm and himself. Time is a finite resource. If you take too much of it to get one thing done then the total amount that you produce is less. If the resources given to a task are the same but the production is less then you are less productive. When you have a particular public program which you think may be improved, then you ought to criticize THAT program without generalization or flippancy. Some programs are less efficient then others and there is some benefit from concentrating on those, but my point is the whole system of government budgeting and political accountability is less prone to produce efficiency then market forces. The generalization is appropriate, even central to the point being raised. As for flippancy I don't recall any. I am rarely flippant. Tim