Red Clay Citizen

Privatizing Government

What does the Democratic-led US Senate do when its government run restaurants are operating at deficits each year and the food and service is "substandard"?

It agrees to privatize them.  Sen. Diane Feinstein comments:

"Candidly, I don't think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn't need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses."

In a letter to colleagues, Feinstein said that the Government Accountability Office found that "financially breaking even has not been the objective of the current management due to an expectation that the restaurants will operate at a deficit annually." (emphasis mine).

How many other government operations lack profit motive that would be better served through private enterprise?  I would bet quite a few if we started making a list.

18 Years Old - Period

There are some new clever, but epicyclical, ways of determining whether someone is underage for drinking. For example, N.C. is considering vertical driver's licenses for people under 21. Now that's smart, but probably more bureaucratic and costly. So what would be the simple, copernican approach?

Let's make everything happen at 18. Drinking age. Driving age. Voting age. Soldiering age. Currently it's almost cliche to say that you can go to war and vote, but not drink a beer. We entrust driving priveges to 16-year-olds -- some of which would be better off with provisional or learners' licenses. The state should have a single age at which someone is considered a fully responsible agent and citizen. Why not 18? No crazy driver's licenses. No dubious restrictions based on traffic fatality reduction rates and drunk driving concerns. Just 18. Simple. Then we could prepare our children to be responsible citizens along the way without sending them mixed signals and unprincipled notions of rights and responsibilities.
-Max Borders

When Journalists Comment on Economic Matters

...you get stuff like this. First, the N&O says:

The Bush era has been for businesses of all kinds sort of like a rebirth of the "free love" movement of the 1960s. Anything goes.

But is this true?

The slightest investigation into regulations would reveal that it is a non-partisan phenomenon and the regulatory state expandes with pretty much any administration. If anything, the Bush Administration has been as reg-crazy as any other, so to characterize it as "free love," means they were more interested in evoking the cute analogy than actually looking into the expansion of the federal register.

The less-than-informed commenters at the N&O would also do well to think outside the regulatory box when it comes to achieving regulatory outcomes. The common law, which is more distributed, precise, and less likely to bring about unintended consequences, is preferable than letting college-grad hill staffers craft legs that uninformed pols simply sign off on for political reasons.

In any case, is the Bush Administration anti-regulation? If anything, they - via the OMB- have made cost-benefit analysis and scrutiny of regs a higher priority, but they have not slowed the growth of the regulatory state to any appreciable degree. A shred of investigation would reveal that regulators regulate -- D or R. More investigation would reveal that regulations have very high social costs that these articles are pretty flippant about. Facts straight, please.
-Max Borders

The Forgotten Man

Mitch Kokai has a great interview with Amity Shlaes on her wonderful book "The Forgotten Man," which is a public choice treatment of the Great Depression. For those of us who were sold, and have bought into, the mythology of FDR's big government saving the country from the Depression, its time to look at these years from a very different perspectives. (Here's the book.)
-Max Borders

Flexible Pay for Bureaucrats

Interesting idea from Singapore: make government more flexible with wages, pay, and performance. (I'd add, of course, cost-cutting incentives.)
-Max Borders

Water-head Bureaucrats

How many times do we have to say it? : if you charge people the full costs of what they consume, they will opt for all sorts of conservation measures -- including spigots, showerheads, and low-flow toilets (the latter of which, by the way, sometimes require 3 flushes to take -- wasting water as an unintended consequence).

So why are authorities trying to regulate our lives like this?

Unless North Carolina seeks new water conservation methods, the ongoing population boom will make it difficult for state officials to prevent long-term water shortages, experts told hundreds of state and local leaders Friday.

If simple technology solutions such as low-flow shower heads aren't used, governments will have to consider limits on residential growth or the development of smaller, more expensive water reservoirs, said John Morris, director of the North Carolina Division of Water Resources.

Will somebody please pass a law requiring all public officials to have had economics?
-Max Borders

State Benefits: A Ticking Time-Bomb

This Greensboro News & Record article by our own Brian Balfour is a must-read for anyone concerned about North Carolina's unfunded liability. What's that? Read it.
-Max Borders

McKinsey Report: $2.5 million to Describe Government

According to this piece in the N&O, McKinsey - the management consulting company - got $2.5 million to makes the following assessments of the DOT:

A consultant's evaluation of the state Department of Transportation found the agency to be inefficient, unfocused and inflexible. The report by McKinsey & Co., an international management consultant, is based on surveys filled out anonymously by nearly 9,000 employees and on interviews with dozens of state, business and local officials. The employees said the department wastes money and time because upper managers change priorities, sometimes daily. They said that projects drift for years, that low-level workers fear political consequences if they express new ideas, and that better leadership could shave years off the time it takes to finish major projects.

$2.5 million to describe what we already knew about the NCDOT? What we know about government bureaucracies? Don't believe me, try reading this (HT - Brian Balfour).
- Max Borders