dagblog - Comments for "Public Money for Public Purpose"

"Republican venality

Peter Schwartz — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:32:10 +0000

In reply to http://www.nytimes.com/2012/0

"Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/0

Peter Schwartz — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:28:42 +0000

In reply to Thinking more about it, I'm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/opinion/brooks-where-are-the-liberals.html?_r=1&hp

Though I truly hate this guy and the opening is disingenuous, self-serving horseshit, and I wouldn't dream of speaking your names in the same breath, I do think Brooks' argument dovetails with what you're saying...in a way.

To some degree, the anti-liberal, anti-government propaganda has been effective...

To some degree, the starving the beast strategy has worked...

To some degree, liberals have ignored the art of good government...

And to some degree, perhaps, we haven't spent enough time instituting the controls and safeguards you seem to be arguing for...

Funny, as I was thinking it

Peter Schwartz — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:47:39 +0000

In reply to Thinking more about it, I'm

Funny, as I was thinking it through, it occurred to me that there was/is probably more corruption at the local level than at the higher levels. Probably because you get into a situation where people know each other and you have the equivalent of cliques, long- time friendships and vendettas. So I think you're right about that.

I shouldn't comment any more until I read Dan's articles, however-:)

Thinking more about it, I'm

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:36:38 +0000

In reply to To be clear, if we were to

Thinking more about it, I'm not sure that there is a correlation between size and corruption. If anything, it may be the opposite--see my response to Art above. And the federal government was certainly much smaller in the Gilded Age.

I guess what really concerned me was Dan's faith in the government administration of a massive jobs program. Patronage systems are built on distribution of government jobs, and if you're not careful, the system can go very awry. The federal government managed to finally break the grip of patronage by implementing civil service exams at the end of the 19th century, but there are still modern parallels in the various government contracts and subsidies.

I don't know a lot about the WPA. I think it worked relatively smoothly, though I wonder how it would have gone if it had lasted longer and become entrenched.

I didn't get to the city

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:24:10 +0000

In reply to Sounds like you weren't a

I didn't get to the city until 2000, so I missed that golden era.

One would think that government would work better on smaller scales, but I think that it's very often worse at the local level. Even in the Gilded Age, Tammany Hall was more corrupt than New York state, which was more corrupt than Washington. I'm not sure how that affects Dan's proposal, but it's an interesting phenomenon.

Yes, I haven't read all

Peter Schwartz — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 04:24:54 +0000

In reply to Actually, I think your

Yes, I haven't read all four.

I didn't really get at my point well above.

Here's what I mean: In discussions with conservatives, I find it often comes down to arguments about private vs. public. Which does a better job? For example...

Private enterprise is, they claim, more efficient, provides better service, and doesn't bleed red ink. If it doesn't do those things, then it goes out of business.

Public organizations tend to be inefficient, provide bad service, and bleed red ink all the time, which the taxpayer has to pay for. And there seems to be no penalty for poor performance.

I agree there are those differences between the two types of structures.

But I also think there are other considerations:

• There are special incentives for private companies to be well-run. They go out of business otherwise. But those incentives very often don't do the trick. IOW, a LOT of private firms go out of business or limp along.

• At the same time, other kinds of incentives for doing a good job, other than making profit, getting a raise, or not getting fired exist within the public sector. Serving the public. Improving the community. Helping people who aren't getting helped otherwise. These goals CAN and DO motivate people to do a good job. I read the other day, how this young bureaucrat improved the efficiency of her office's data management systems by 90%.

• When I first moved to D.C., the DMV was a nightmare. And, actually, DMVs are a favorite target of conservatives--that and the Post Office. But...people complained and, at a certain point, the DMV made DRAMATIC improvements in how they were run and the service they provided. It was startling the changes they made.

And when I moved to Arlington, just across the river, I saw how well a government could be run. It was like night and day.

• My point is that it's possible to run public sector organizations well...and poorly. The DMV doesn't go out of business when it's run poorly, but that negative incentive isn't required for dedicated civil servants to recognize a need and institute major reforms.

• Private companies are often more efficient because they aren't democratic institutions. Their leaders don't have a wide constituency they answer to. The private v public comparison is an apples to oranges comparison. Yes, some business principles can be adopted to improve public agencies, but they are fundamentally different animals. Public agencies serve the PUBLIC which is, by definition, big, broad, and diverse. It's constituted by people who disagree fundamentally about what should be done, why, how and where.

• Private companies have, relatively speaking, narrow aims. Principally, they need to make a profit. And they get to make a profit providing a clearly defined set of products and services. Public organizations have much broader portfolios and constituencies. And they don't have the P&L as a clear yardstick.

• Private firms get to pick and choose the challenges they tackle. If they make a profit, it's often because they've lopped off unprofitable lines. Public institutions are there to fill needs--needs the public wants filled--even if they aren't profitable. FEDEX vs the Post Office is a good example of this. We are committed to universal service, even where it doesn't pay to deliver. FEDEX is under no such obligation and actually relies on the USPS in regions where it isn't profitable for them to go.

• Lastly, the public sphere gives the public the power and opportunity to say, "We want to see X happen" when, for whatever reason, the market isn't meeting that need. The public doesn't have to wait around for an entrepreneur to fill the need. Conservatives will often tell me that if a need really exists, some smart entrepreneur will come along to fill it. Not so. Only if it's profitable to fill that need will an entrepreneur move in. But just because a need isn't profitable to meet doesn't mean it isn't an important need worth filling.

So here's my point: Public and private organizations are different animals. They face different challenges. They serve different purposes. They necessarily operate differently. They both can run well and poorly and there's knowledge we have about running both kinds of organizations well and poorly.

Yes, when the public sector goes bad, it really stinks because people are trapped within its tentacles. But that isn't a defect of the public sphere; it is inherent in serving the public democratically. Everyone benefits when things go well; everyone suffers when things go badly. And change happens more slowly and perhaps less perfectly and with more rules and red tape because a lot of people's needs and views have to be addressed. At Bain Capital, all Romney had to say was, "Make it so," and it was so.

Actually, I think your

artappraiser — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 01:22:24 +0000

In reply to For the sake of argument,

Actually, I think your argument is with Dan. Read the whole set of his essays. He wants "public" (government) control of a whole lot more things than it has control of now or ever did. He wants it a lot bigger and a lot more powerful. Seems like he is willing to bet that the results will be good, certainly it's clear he thinks it will better than what we have now.

For the sake of argument,

Peter Schwartz — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 23:42:04 +0000

In reply to Sounds like you weren't a

For the sake of argument, don't we have to distinguish between good government and bad government?

Don't we also have to decide whether government--perhaps when a municipality gets to a certain size--NECESSARILY becomes bad and corrupt or whether it can be made good and reformed?

To be clear, if we were to

Peter Schwartz — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 23:39:36 +0000

In reply to I wasn't suggesting that the

To be clear, if we were to expand the government's powers and remove checks on its authority as Dan has proposed, we should think about alternative constraints that could become necessary rather than trusting that a democratically elected government will use its powers wisely.

I don't think anyone could wisely disagree with this.

I guess your example of the Gilded Age got me a bit bolloxed up because, the political machines notwithstanding, government was surely much smaller back then.

Most of the things conservatives think of as "big government" didn't exist back then, including the income tax, almost all the regulatory bodies, minimum wage laws, etc.

Maybe local government was more powerful and the federal government was less powerful.

Or maybe the problem was that government, all around, was smaller, but also far less democratic. It was much more corrupt with power, even if it was less power than government has today, concentrated in fewer hands.

Even though we wail about a lack of transparency, we certainly have much more transparency, by many orders of magnitude, than we did back then.

Sounds like you weren't a

artappraiser — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:32:25 +0000

In reply to I wasn't suggesting that the

Sounds like you weren't a resident of New York City in the 1980's, otherwise you would use that example by now.

I won't go into the particulars of moving here from the Midwest in 82, all I will say is that "dysfunctional big government" is too polite, a horror for any citizen without a lot of money or power is more like it. You feared, really feared having to have anything to do with that machine. You didn't complain, you lived with the hassles and the horror show, the high taxation rates (taxes on everything, everywhere! taxes that it was impossible to know about but they could fine you to death for if you hadn't paid them if they decided they wanted to get you) which got you a filthy, potholed, falling apart city, you lived with not just disrespect but the constant unfair abuse by government employees, who really felt they were better than citizens, you lived with fear for your own safety, and you didn't dare complain to anyone in government or it would just get worse.

Pick a topic, any topic: sanitation (not just rats but burned out cars on major streets and highways for months on end) schools, parks, streets, toll collection, infrastructure, welfare, homeless, crime, sewers, rent regulation, subways, business regulation, social services, ability to just get someone, anyone in city government to just answer a frigging phone--all terribly dysfunctional and corrupt, all employing lots of people with decent salaries accomplishing worse than nothing but rather, seeming to make things worse and worse, and with major attitude towards citizens. Unless you "knew" somebody, though it was definitely a fun place to visit, but you wouldn't want to have to cope with living there as a middle class person or below, then the horror show of trying to get through daily life began.

It's an inconvenient subject rarely raised in the blogosphere: an overwhelmingly Democratic city of 8 million has not elected a Democrat for mayor for 5 terms now. Yes, the memories of the machine unleashed, without a counterweight in charge, are that bad.

It's easy for me to reign in my anger now as a homeowner when dealing with things like uppity & nasty city sewer guys trying to blame homeowners' plumbing for the floods in our basements, so the problem causing it won't go on the record. All I have to do is remember the nightmare of the city tow pound in Donald Manes' day, where you were never sure whether you might have to offer sexual favors to get your car back, that's if you didn't get mugged for all the cash everyone knew you had to bring to the filthy, scary bullet-scarred dimly-lit "office," and if your car hadn't already been stripped while in the tow pound. And don't try to challenge why you were towed! You wouldn't get out of that hellish parking court without more fines than you went in with. One judge left me for an hour looking for records, came back and said, well I see we got your check on record, but the somebody that cashed it wasn't us, so you still have to pay the late fines!

P.S.. My dad was a civil servant back for the city I came from. He worked in Personnel and Labor Negotiation. That city ran okay back then, at least compared to the NY I moved to; it doesn't happen to anymore. He had very little respect for most of the people he worked with back then, and really suffered at his job which he did not leave for our benefit; we heard him rant to my mom about the politics being played and how unfair it all was nearly every night, how corrupt the system was, how people who schmoozed instead of getting work done got rewarded, sometimes he was so upset he'd meet secretly with reporters, yeah one of those anonymice. BTW, he was a liberal Democrat, and they were mostly Democrats. And yeah, he is still enjoying his pension, but he did suffer 40 years for it.