On Feb 13, 8:37*pm, Tim Streater wrote:
In article
,





*Ste wrote:
On Feb 13, 1:39*pm, (Cynic) wrote:
On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:53:21 -0800 (PST), Ste
wrote:
It is not the "market economy" that is soaking up people's wages to
make it unaffordable to live on a single income. *It is government
taxation.

Rubbish! Direct taxes are at their lowest in living memory. Indirect
taxes (e.g. point-of-use charges) have increased massively, but people
such as yourself often tend to support such things anyway as an
alternative to direct taxes.

And the point is, my taxes pay for the public services that I, my
family, and friends enjoy. I don't have a problem paying taxes in
principle, and I don't have this imaginary perception like you do that
the public sector is full of workshy layabouts who sit around drinking
tea all day.

No, they probably work quite hard, a lot of them. But because it's a
monopoly, there's no incentive, as there is in the private sector, to
improve processes and squeeze out waste.

Rubbish. There isn't a need to constantly motivate people with
"incentives", by which you implicitly mean financial incentives. Moral
narratives and collective purpose, are sufficient to an extent to
motivate people. It is private profit that often assaults these very
incentives.

It doesn't mean the public sector runs itself - it needs political
oversight to ensure efficient use of public money (and by 'efficient'
I mean efficient in terms of achieving political policy, not in terms
of spending the least possible amount of money), but the private
sector is simply not a substitute for this.



As I've said previously, my experience of the public sector is that
most of the 'waste' occurs at the interface with the private sector.

And that's because in the public sector, there appears to be a complete
inability to write contracts.

No, it's because they're being forced to write contracts that would
otherwise not be written, because the nature of the operation requires
flexibility and above all, mutual trust. It's the same reason as why
most organisations have employees rather than contractors, because you
don't have to renegotiate a contract every time you want the employee
to do something different.



It is true (though not in my direct expeirence) that
the public sector can be inefficiently organised

Got that bit right ...

and lacks political control, but the private sector often lacks
organisation almost by definition, precisely because there
is so much atomisation of the productive process (not least because
monopoly is prevented), and it often also lacks the appropriate
incentives (which is precisely why it cannot be permitted monopoly).

The private sector knows how to manage sub-contractors, and how to get
the best results from them in terms of quality and price, precisely
because they have the incentive to do so, a quality so conspicuously
lacking in the public sector.

The private sector manages difficult kinds of subcontracting by
internalising those functions - it only externalises those functions
that it can manage successfully, so it is very easy to reflect and say
the private sector is expert in managing external subcontractors. The
public sector does divide and externalise - you don't have the same
organisation running schools as railways - but if permitted (which it
is not), the public sector does so in a more efficient way than the
private sector.



How often are we hearing about IT
projects, or MoD cost increases? All the bloody time.

All projects run by the private sector! Funnily enough, I don't
remember all these IT fiascos before the mid-90s, when it was all
outsourced to the private sector.



You may or may not remember a time some 25 years ago when Jaguar nearly
went tits-up, because they allowed their subcontractors to do component
quality testing, rather than doing it themselves. As a result,
reliability of the XJ6 during that era was rubbish and sales plummeted.
Eventually they scrapped that policy and things picked up.

That sort of discipline is lacking in the public sector.

But if the production of those components had been internalised, there
would have been *no incentive* for anyone to have violated the quality
parameters in the first place!