Efficiency in Government
EFFICIENCY IN GOVERNMENT
(Tatoodi)
The government is mostly referred to as being grossly inefficient. This common and wide spread belief is the result of a lack of understanding of the functions and the processes of governmental organizations and malicious propaganda of the private sector seeking unlimited freedom to cheat the public.
If there is an activity which is likely to be profitable, some or the other private entity will pursue it. No private company will even try to start an enterprise if it does not promise to be profitable.
If market forces could meet all real and perceived needs of the society, government would not have been invented. The concept of government was developed to meet the needs of the society unlikely to be fulfilled by the market forces, to protect the general public from the malpractices of the businesses and to maintain law and order (not those of the businesses but those of the nation as a whole). The benefits of such activities are very indirect and intangible and therefore not susceptible to monetary measurement. It is therefore unreasonable to evaluate the government in the same way investors evaluate companies.
It is estimated that a large percent of the small businesses fail within the first year of their operation. Even among the bigger businesses, failures are not unknown. Nevertheless, private companies are always considered to be models of efficiency which is nothing but a myth.
What happens to the functions which are obviously non-profitable? Most of them never get attended to. However, some of them, such as providing public transportation on non-profitable routes, are so important and necessary that a governmental entity is created and overseen by the national, state, county or city legislature, to provide the service. The entity would then be unable to avoid incurring losses. Ironically, the government then gets labeled as inefficient for doing some thing which was non-profitable to begin with.
Since they are dealing with public funds, the managers of the governmental organizations are required to keep detailed records of all their activities, decisions and transactions to prove their honesty in case of accusations of frauds etc. As a result, more elaborate procedures need to be developed which slow down the processes of decision-making. Although this protects the public funds from being misused, it also generates mostly unfounded charges of bureaucratic red tape and inefficiency.
Private companies can resort to all sorts of tricks to maximize their profits by enhancing their revenues and cutting their expenses. Many, if not most, of them would not desist from unfair and illegal practices like price fixing, polluting etc. A government entity cannot resort to such methods in order to enhance their apparent efficiency and in turn gets blamed as being inefficient.
The compensation paid to the public employees falls far short of that paid for equivalent functions in the private sector. By the latest report the federal employees are paid about 25 per cent less than their counterparts in the private companies. This comparison covers all aspects of compensations such as health insurance and pension benefits etc. The saying ‘ you get what you pay for. ‘ applies here too. (In fact the buyers always get less than what they pay for; how else would sellers make their profits?) A nation which is unwilling to pay the proper wages to its employees cannot avoid ending up with a less efficient government.
It is amazing as well as unwise that the political leaders teach the people to distaste their own government controlled, through constitutional checks and balances, by an elected legislature and place an unbinding faith in the market place controlled by un-elected people whose only objective is the maximization of their profits. In a democratic country, hatred for the government is improper and detrimental to the common interests of the people themselves. The only persons who should fear the government are those who violate the laws.
People, lacking faith in the government, support and encourage ‘ non-profit charitable ‘ organizations, run by persons drawing several times the salaries of the public employees, to conduct the activities which can as well be conducted by the government institutes. The same people are all too eager to be told by the IRS as to which of the charitable organizations are good enough to qualify for deduction on the Schedule ‘A’ of their income tax returns.
Corporate greed is encouraged as being an obligation of the managers to the investors none of whom are elected by the people. Governmental inefficiency is curbed by legislative oversight by peoples' elected representatives. Therefore, corporate greed hurts the country several times more than the governmental inefficiency. Strangely, we are always willing to forgive the former but never the latter.
If an elected government does not represent the nation, who or what else does? Why then do we teach our children to dislike government?