Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Before Teddy Roosevelt was president, he was key in the enactment of Civil Service exams and meritorious hiring of public employees. Before him State-run services were inefficient & corrupt because every time a new Party took office, they fired everyone from the old Party and hired based on patronage. Now, however, the problem is entrenched Public Employee unions. There is no way to treat government agencies like private entrepreneurship due to lack of a negotiating position. Government jobs are spectacular in their inefficiency, inertia & lack of innovation. The simplest solution is to privatize most government services, and let Government's role be one of specification & oversight. Government should only perform services like watchdog, defense & the courts.

Without proper negotiation, an organization cannot balance, it will get heavier & heavier on the side of self-dealing until it collapses. The U.S. is crumbling from the inside: those who get money from Government vs. those who pay for it. Over the long term, this self-dealing is the most dangerous threat to America: just the promised but unfunded public employee retirement obligations would turn taxpayers into serfs. Let private companies negotiate with their employees with collective bargaining, and if one side beats the other too far into failure then Government simply takes the next bidder in line.

Privatization is not exactly the same as a Market Forces solution because there is no profit component, instead those companies that most closely match the specified objectives can procure a contractual relationship with government. Politicians define what those objectives are but businesses implement them. The advantage is that government remains flexible: they can experiment with alternative methods for education, policing, fire protection & safety, incarceration, public transportation, licensing & maintaining public areas. Methods & people that don't work out would be replaced by ones that do. There should certainly be no janitors, food servers, gardeners, or other Market Forces-driven sector of the private economy working directly for government because government should not be involved in true Markets at all. And since the private sector's focus is the wants of the few while government's job is the needs of the many, an adversarial relationship applies, making negotiation between them possible.