Name:   copperline - Subject:   On government excess & inefficiency Date:   2/22/2016 11:23:25 AM

                In reading my last post, I was interested in how the subject diverted into a brief discussion of government inefficiency and waste…a theme that gets repeated plenty of times in this forum and in the media.  And my point here is not to deny that this can be true, but to add a few talking points that I think are worth considering but don’t get mentioned much.

                Ex-government employees, several of whom are on this forum, seem to always portray that the part of government they observed in was full of wasted efforts, misspent money, inefficient processes, lazy & entitled workers doing next to nothing.   To balance out their opinions, they usually add that not all government employees are slacking off, but only as an afterthought to weakly balance out negative reflections on their time of service.   

We all respect their opinions and observations, but that’s the problem.  You see, the overwhelming narrative in this country is a negative view of the manner that government services are designed and delivered.    And, there is plenty to criticize.   But it is also true that most of us will not work for the government, and that most of the readers here will have their sole contact with “government workers” at the county courthouse, some highway department employees and the guys down at the ABC store.   The complexities of government functions are not easy to understand or appreciate because the scope of the mission can be so huge that it defies easy understanding by the average joe.  

Government fills in the blanks that civil society can't provide.   It has to build infrastructure, maintain orderly processes between various parts of society, enforce rules of balance, fairness, safety, etc.    In attempting such a global mission, we have developed government (and I include military) departments carrying out functions that seem positively alien to us because what they do is unlike anything we are familiar with in the retail sales & local sector where we live out our lives.   In that way, both a food stamp program and a governmental department purposed with reviewing vast military contracts and trade agreements aren’t easily understood and can appear to us as frivolous examples of waste.   It has become too easy to believe that the government’s primary function is to employ people to do expensive work of dubious value, & chock full of people whose only mission is to waste their time & our money.

I wish my friends who are ex-government workers would do more to change that narrative, not because we should have Pollyanna’s view of the world, but because it’s more complicated than that.

Chances are if you have been a government worker, you can appreciate what I mean.   Chances are the functions of your part of government service could not be provided in the ‘private sector’ and yet were still important… perhaps even critically important in ways that aren’t clear to the rest of us.   Chances are, you did not work in your job feeling like you & your compatriots were committing fraud.   Chances are, explaining the details of your department’s activities just doesn’t make sense unless your listener also understands the larger details of the mission… which most of us do not.

I have not been a government employee, but at some times over my career my salary was funded in part by tax dollars funneled to the social service/healthcare agencies I worked for.   Those ‘indirect’ government jobs were important in a small way, but I am used to having trouble explaining why that was true because there was nothing grand & dramatic about what we did.   Most of it was on such a small and personal scale that it could be seen as useless by anyone who was unfamiliar with the big picture.   Most of the government & ex-government employees I know have worked in departments with mission statements far bigger & more complex than anything I have done… and far bigger and more complex than the average civilian will ever have experience with.   So when an ex-government worker or military officer supports the impression that the system is broken, rife with fraud & waste, and full of empty-headed people, everyone reacts by feeling that we are being robbed and gets angry.   Your first-hand testimony has complete credibility with us.

IMO, inefficiency & waste exists in every organization.   And as you scale up, inefficiencies only increase.   As complexity of the mission (of government) increases, as the scope of the largest & wealthiest country ever known grows…. We have plenty of examples of how things could be done better.  And we should try to improve on our system, it’s always going to be a work in progress.  But I think it is a fallacy to dismiss government functions as useless, instead we need to think specifically about what we need government to do that cannot, or should not, be done by private corporations….or left undone altogether.    We need to better appreciate that in a complex & modern society, there are things that only a government can do to keep the train from running off the rails.

It would be great if ex- or current government / military workers would also tell us about what they did in ways that make us understand the unique contributions their department was making, and how those important functions could not have been provided otherwise.  Give the rest of us a better understanding… more opportunity to be proud that we funded your work and to be happy that your government service contributed to the common good as well as to your family & career.  

Believe me, we need to know.