Thread: Occupy cprogamming.com!

Originally Posted by Elkvis

if I made a customer wait for a half hour for service while I play solitaire, I would be fired. government employees get a pass on this sort of behavior. like I said, I see it every single day.

And yet many large private corporations are notorious for their poor customer service, via farming out call centers half way across the world to people who barely speak whatever language and cannot provide any real help, etc.

This may seem contra the logic that "private enterprise is self-correcting", because many people naively believe this means that competition improves the quality of service. Unfortunately, what trumps that is cutting costs. If you can provide crappy service at a minimal cost, people will tend to settle for less. I think a very large percentage of private industry succeeds because of this.

I agree that many government employees (or employees of government contractors) can seem counter-productive, if I consider myself as their customer. However, on average I do not see a substantial difference between government agencies and private businesses -- sometimes they are good, sometimes they are bad.

The question then is, when the service is crappy, is the government paying too much for it? I agree that that may often be the case. Politics is a lot about: "What do you want to pay for, and how much do you want to pay for it?"

Originally Posted by Elkvis

you are using drug control policy and law enforcement as a very broad brush to paint the right side of the aisle. as a libertarian, I'd be in favor of more open drug policy

That's great, but I think the width of my brush here is appropriate. You are in a small minority on the US right, most of which scream wolf at the hint of reducing spending on the drug war or of abandoning the thing all together.

So I am a very cynical about the idea that they want a smaller government or that they want to reduce spending. They do not; what they want to reduce spending on are left wing policies; they are quite happy to run a colossal deficit on eg, military spending, and they seem very happy about running a substantial police state*. Again, what kind of "small government" is that?

my garbage man is an employee of a private contractor, whom I pay directly. many cities are going to this sort of setup.

I think that is good idea, and I agree there are many more areas the government should get out of (such as education). My original beef was with this:

but the further left you go, the more they seem to want the government to control everything

Yet from my perspective, it is mostly people on the right who are determined to control everything. Eg, the free enterprise system is a very contrived thing which would be impossible without a large and powerful government. Notice who creates and underwrites your currency. The right wing seem to think that is the most important role of government (to underwrite and protect an economic system).

You can claim that is not a form of control, but then we are just arguing semantics.

* isn't that just a form of work/welfare for cops and prison guards?