Comment by saberience
10 hours ago
Government IS inefficient though, and it's inefficient because there is zero competition and also complete job security. It's also inefficient because the employees are generally bottom of the barrel folks due to the incredibly poor wages.
So you can get people working in the government who couldn't get a job in the private sector if they tried, working with total job security (they can't get fired) for an entity with zero competition so there is no drive or motivation to get better or otherwise improve.
Whereas with private companies you can get hired quickly and fired quickly, meaning you have to perform well (motivation), you are paid better so you attract higher quality candidates, and also if the company does badly you go bankrupt, which means the whole company performs better or dies. The companies which remain win the market and are more efficient (as they are the companies which survived).
This is the fairy tale as it’s often told. Doesn’t match up with my experience. The incompetence and waste in private organizations is staggering. The free market efficiency and competency of the free market is greatly overstated.
That's a very US-centric viewpoint though, it doesn't apply to every government or society.
If the US government is more inefficient than others then there's something to be said about how it works, how it could be improved, instead there's only this rhetoric that doesn't invite at all the discussion about what are its failures and paths to improve, just recycled catchphrases supported by a cliché.
Private companies are also inefficient in many ways even with competition, why is that if competition is supposed to make inefficient companies uncompetitive? Maybe there's something else to discuss rather than these thought-terminating clichés...