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Survival of the Fittest Government Organizations?

Xerographica

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Does anybody have any interesting arguments against subjecting government organizations (GOs) to survival of the fittest? The process would simply involve allowing taxpayers to directly allocate their taxes among the various GOs at anytime throughout the year.
 
Does anybody have any interesting arguments against subjecting government organizations (GOs) to survival of the fittest? The process would simply involve allowing taxpayers to directly allocate their taxes among the various GOs at anytime throughout the year.

You mean subject a government to the discipline of profit and loss based on their ability to cost-effectively produce a product for which customers willingly pay, like all other businesses?

What would then differentiate government from any other business?

On the face of it, I'm in favor.
 
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Centinel, oh, yeah...you put it so well.

The only difference between public and private organizations would be that people would have to allocate a certain percentage of their income to organizations in the public sector. Nobody forces you to spend any money on non-profit or for-profit organizations...but the IRS would just ensure that you "donated" enough of your money to the GOs of your choosing.
 
Centinel, oh, yeah...you put it so well.

The only difference between public and private organizations would be that people would have to allocate a certain percentage of their income to organizations in the public sector. Nobody forces you to spend any money on non-profit or for-profit organizations...but the IRS would just ensure that you "donated" enough of your money to the GOs of your choosing.

Even that's a damn sight better than we have now. Sure, count me in. :)
 
No. It's idiotic.

Free market principles don't work in things other than markets. Market forces require things like informed customers, freedom of choice, and competition. You have exactly none of those things when it comes to, say, maintaining a power grid or highway infrastructure.

Off the top of your head: How many food inspectors are sufficient to ensure acceptable food safety?

People would have no way of knowing how well funds were being allocated. (your online progress bar wouldn't work. it can't update live and 3/4 of the population sends in their taxes in the last week before they're due)
 
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Deuce...so the survival of the fittest concept only applies to businesses?

Off the top of your head...how many data centers does Google maintain?

If the FDA wasn't receiving enough funds...but nobody noticed...does it really matter?
 
Deuce...so the survival of the fittest concept only applies to businesses?

Off the top of your head...how many data centers does Google maintain?

If the FDA wasn't receiving enough funds...but nobody noticed...does it really matter?

People would notice after the number of deaths went up. I'm sure the flood of funding to the FDA afterwards would make their families feel better, except now our roads are falling apart because they weren't in the news this week.
 
You mean after roads and food safety, the efficacy of government falls off fast?
 
Does anybody have any interesting arguments against subjecting government organizations (GOs) to survival of the fittest? The process would simply involve allowing taxpayers to directly allocate their taxes among the various GOs at anytime throughout the year.

Personally, I think they should run a government agency like a business in this way. Define certain key indices, give the managers a budget and a good deal of autonomy on meeting those indices, if they reduce cost, they get a substantial bonus, if they increase cost, they do not. If they increase their numbers they get a bonus, if not, then not.

Every few years, any agency in a group of agencies for whatever metric gets cut if its the lowest performing and that money goes towards the highest performing.
 
Deuce, so the people over at the FDA aren't going to say or do anything about losing substantial funding...and the families of people who are sick aren't going to say or do anything either?

Perhaps it might help if you read this relatively short and simple article on how markets work...A Marvel of Cooperation: How Order Emerges without a Conscious Planner.
 
The FDA is not the reason government is $14T in the hole.
 
Mega...right now political muscle, rather than merit, determines funding for government agencies. The only way to get around the political muscle is if taxpayers themselves are allowed to determine merit and allocate their individual taxes accordingly. So what you said is completely correct...but it cannot be accomplished from within the political sphere.
 
You mean people who don't pay taxes don't vote?

I'd like to see that in action!
 
Deuce, so the people over at the FDA aren't going to say or do anything about losing substantial funding...and the families of people who are sick aren't going to say or do anything either?

Perhaps it might help if you read this relatively short and simple article on how markets work...A Marvel of Cooperation: How Order Emerges without a Conscious Planner.
Well, for one, saying something after people die isn't as helpful as doing something before that happens.
They'll say something, yes. Will you hear it? Will you know? Is the FDA going to have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising their funding shortfall? Yeah, that sounds efficient.

You keep missing the key point. Government is not a market. There's no competitor to the FDA you can switch to. There's no Coke roads when you get pissed off at Pepsi's roads. You can't just choose NOT to have national defense. The USDA is not a competitor to the USAF, but you're trying to set up a situation in which they are.

Competition. Choice. Information. Without all three of these, a particular market functions horribly. None of these are present.

You mean people who don't pay taxes don't vote?

I'd like to see that in action!

Yeah, we got rid of that idea in the 1850s.
You're anti-American because you don't believe in the most fundamental right that exists in a democracy.
 
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Deuce, too much fun. I was just looking through my very first poli-sci textbook (A Delicate Balance by Paul Light) and found this interesting passage...

Roughly one out of every six Americans currently works for a private firm that receives federal contracts. Roughly two-thirds of those contracts came from the Department of Defense, which accounted for over $120 billion in 1997, and roughly two-thirds of those defense dollars went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin (airplanes), McDonnel Douglas (airplanes), Northrup Grumann (airplanes), General Motors (tanks and trucks), and Ratheon (weapons systems).

For some reason you think that public goods occur in some type of vacuum...yet one in six Americans' livelihood depends to some extent on federal funding.

Plus, as I explained to you before...with good fundraising practices...non-profit organizations receive $5 for every $1 they spend on fundraising. If an organization spent $100 million on fundraising they would get $500 million in return. If you think this is a bad deal send me $500 and I'll send you $100 in return...or we can make it easy and you can just send me $400.

Information...check!

The concept that you...and nearly all other voters...fail to consider is that of opportunity cost. Nearly 75% of Americans support Obama's Jobs bill to provide funding for more teachers and first responders. Should we go further into debt to pay for the funding...or perhaps we should increase the amount of taxes that rich people pay? Yeah, most Americans would vote for having the rich pay their "fair share" and the rich will continue to try and protect their interests.

Everybody benefits if each and every taxpayer is forced to consider the opportunity costs of their individual tax allocation decisions. It's the only way to guarantee that limited public resources are efficiently allocated.

Competition...check!

Choice......it's the only thing missing.
 
Every taxpayer?

Or every voter?
 
I'm not too sure this would work out to well myself. Me and my friends over many a drunken political discussion suggested solutions such as this many a time with with the end result almost always being that some often forgotten essential government programs would get left by the wayside until some sort of tragedy would occur to bring the 'error' into light. It is not beyond the scope of reason that once this tragedy occurs that it would essentially be too late for corrective action to take place. Think FEMA funding after several years of mild weather events (i.e. people not perceiving a necessity to contribute to FEMA during mild climactic periods). Another potential problem that we have theorized would be the public funding lash-back eradicating a good program if some scandal occurred that was really an isolated incident of corruption (say that a member of the FDA took a bribe and people died as a result).

The only way I could actually see this being non-disastrous is to mandate that x% of income is withheld and MUST be distributed to GO's, AND there would very obviously be a necessity for "Sacred Cows" such as Defense, Intelligence, FEMA, Infrastructure, FDA, EPA, SEC, Education, Justice Department, FAA, FCC, the list can go on and on and on and on until the point where we have the system we have now.

While I may be taking a pessimistic attitude toward this it really would end up being a privatization of our current government (even more so than it is now). Government was never intended to be a net profit producer nor was it ever intended to be run as a business. Governments output IS NOT profit, but stable society, as such it should never be held to the same qualifiers. And while on the surface running the government as a business may sound like a good idea the fact of the matter remains that the historical record proves that individuals in a business environment don't always have their customer's (citizens in this case) best interest at heart, as in this situation they would merely be trying to preserve current funding levels at any cost (potentially at citizens' detriment).

Now, I think what would be a more interesting 'solution' would be what I like to call 'Cake Theory'. Cake Theory is that old parable where two children have a cake and a parent asks the 1st child to cut the cake into 2 pieces but lets the other child pick the piece (an attempt to provide to an equitable distribution). Where this comes into play in this discussion is in the following manner:

Categorize industries (i.e. Defense, Technological advancement, Emergency response, Education, etc...). What this allows for is to divert any and all tax revenue garnered from these 'specific industries' to become the next years budget for that particular industry. This, I believe, would have the effect of ensuring that any particular industry (in the aggregate) would be not only inclined but responsible for their own longevity. If the only money they were receiving (from Government) was from tax revenues generated from corporate and personal income taxes from members of their industries then they would be more inclined to pay higher wages to non-managerial employees (thus expanding the amount of revenue guaranteed to them next FY) and less inclined to 'rip-off' the government (decreasing their 'guaranteed' government source of revenue for next FY). It would also mean that private sector firms could NEVER be completely dependent upon the government for their revenue source as tax revenue as a percentage of income would always be a declining scale if this (government expenditure) was their only source.

The GO's on the other hand (i.e. essential programs that basically cannot generate any private revenue like welfare and intelligence as examples) would definitely have to be figured in somehow (small % of tax income across all industries?) but the idea that the more a particular industry is takes out of the economy negatively effects their longevity (the cake theory part) would be a step in the right direction to me.

EDIT: correcting punctuation.
 
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Does anybody have any interesting arguments against subjecting government organizations (GOs) to survival of the fittest? The process would simply involve allowing taxpayers to directly allocate their taxes among the various GOs at anytime throughout the year.

Public goods and externalities.
 
Reg, not every voter pays taxes and not every taxpayer votes. So...every taxpayer should be forced to consider the opportunity costs of their individual tax allocation decisions.
 
Swit, the challenge of this concept is considering the aggregate. That's why I created this survey...Tax Allocation Survey. You can copy and paste your pie chart into this thread.

The one sure way I can tell for certain that somebody does not understand how the invisible hand works is if they predict that some essential public good would be underfunded. Check out this short and simple article on how markets work...A Marvel of Cooperation: How Order Emerges without a Conscious Planner.

Look I am not bashing the idea of thinking outside the box.... only that I have discussed this with people and have personally found it lacking.... the sheer number of GO's is staggering (much to the ire of those on the right) and many of those GO's are not nearly as well known or could even be considered general knowledge. And yet some of those little known programs receive LARGE quantities of capital and benefit a whole hell-uv-alot of people (Info: List of US Federal Government Funding Programs). I would be hard pressed to believe you have even heard of half of them but at some point in time or another OUR representatives thought it wise to create them. The long and the short of the matter is that under this 'fund it if you like it' idea, only those programs that garner support from those with money would get funded and those programs that benefit the poor (i.e. those not able to contribute to the programs that benefit them) would fall by the wayside....


EDIT: Are you okay with those people without the means to pay for government services being marginalized, and how do you prevent those with money from holding government programs hostage?
 
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Swit, look through this thread and count how many GOs Deuce predicted that people would forget to fund. You're making the same argument that Deuce made. According to your argument every single person needs to purchase every single private good in order for the economy to work. What percentage of all possible private goods do you think you actually purchase? Do you think you purchase 1% of all the different groceries when you go to the store?

Again, your argument indicates that you don't grasp how the invisible hand works. That's ok, your friends don't grasp it either and neither do any of my friends. Unfortunately, to appreciate pragmatarianism you have to fully understand that the invisible hand will always allocate resources more efficiently than planners can.

At UCLA I studied all the different approaches that countries like our own had employed to help developing countries develop. So many brilliant people came up with these extremely costly plans that utterly failed. However, there was one approach that was completely successful...yet totally unintentional. At the height of their power during the 50s and 60s, unions drove wages up so high that it became economically sound for companies to move production overseas. Unions literally donated their jobs to developing countries. No other intentional attempt to help developing countries was even remotely as effective. Here's my blog entry on the subject...The Dialectic of Unintended Consequences.

There will always be brilliant people who develop public programs to help the poor...and there will always be people who will support such programs. But in a pragmatarian system...the effectiveness of a program will determine its level of support.
 
The Federal Government wastes billions every year because they don't have accountability. Even though I keep hearing that Republican's are slashing this and that, then why has every department's budget been increased beyond inflation for this year?

The Federal Government is a piece of crap. I don't think anyone can summarize it any more succinctly.
 
Deuce, too much fun. I was just looking through my very first poli-sci textbook (A Delicate Balance by Paul Light) and found this interesting passage...



For some reason you think that public goods occur in some type of vacuum...yet one in six Americans' livelihood depends to some extent on federal funding.

Never suggested it was a vacuum.

Plus, as I explained to you before...with good fundraising practices...non-profit organizations receive $5 for every $1 they spend on fundraising. If an organization spent $100 million on fundraising they would get $500 million in return. If you think this is a bad deal send me $500 and I'll send you $100 in return...or we can make it easy and you can just send me $400.

Congratulations. You've just added 20% additional overhead to everything the government does. How very efficient.

Information...check!

The concept that you...and nearly all other voters...fail to consider is that of opportunity cost. Nearly 75% of Americans support Obama's Jobs bill to provide funding for more teachers and first responders. Should we go further into debt to pay for the funding...or perhaps we should increase the amount of taxes that rich people pay? Yeah, most Americans would vote for having the rich pay their "fair share" and the rich will continue to try and protect their interests.

Most Americans do not have the information required to judge the cost of any number of things the government does. Off the top of your head, how low can you drop the FAA's funding before air safety is compromised?


Competition...check!

Competition?
List the competitors to the Federal Aviation Administration I can go to for my Air Traffic Control needs.


Choice......it's the only thing missing.

You don't have a choice. You can't decide to forgo national defense and just get social security instead.
 
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