Symmetric Chaos
Fractal King
Originally posted by tru-marvell
The point which I did not elaborate on, is would a person who has deomonstrated their ablility in the private sector and so would perhaps have less "personal gain" at stake, be better at directing the country?
Depends on what you want to improve and what you mean by improve, for that matter. Things like postal service, roads, utilities, the guy will tell you, rightly, that the best way to make them more efficient is to privatize them. But that's not the only factor of being "better", the reason we have publicly owned things isn't economic efficiency its to make sure that at the end of the day they get done and everybody has access.
And that's part of what slows the government down (the other big part being unlimited funding). You have to serve everyone and you have to do so fairly equally. The tricks employed by business are mainly ones that exploit not having to do that. UPS would probably be in the red just as much as the USPS if they had to send a truck to every mailbox in the country every day.
Like there was, mythically, a guy hired to streamline a public school district. He grew blueberries. They ask him, "Where do we start?" He says, "Well first I go out an inspect the blueberries. The inedible ones get thrown out." One of the teachers raises a hand, "But we have to take all the blueberries."