Why I’m Not a Fan of Government

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Here are just some of the slimy dealings I saw at my rinky-dink municipality on Long Island during my 21 years of civil service:

• Merit raises were bonuses equal to three percent of a recipient’s salary, and 30 to 40 of them were awarded every year by management. But hardly anyone who received a merit raise did so because he or she provided the taxpayers with outstanding service during the previous calendar year. Those who received a merit raise were invariably good donors. Give a thousand dollars to the Republican Party and you were likely to get a merit raise.
• If you worked for less than 30 years at my rinky-dink municipality, you were technically only entitled to get paid for 50 percent of the unused sick days you accumulated during your civil-service career. But this labor-contract rule could be waived at the discretion of the department head. Give the Republican Party a check for $2,500 or more and if you retired or quit with less than 30 years of service, you had a very good chance of being paid for 100 percent of your unused sick days.
• In order to get a mid-level promotion, you had to be among the top three finishers on a civil-service exam. But management could skirt this requirement if the promotion list for a position expired* and management needed to fill that position. So what would it take to be appointed as, say, an acting foreman or an acting construction inspector? Around $5,000. Anyone who dropped that amount of coin on the Republican Party would surely be rewarded with an “acting” title in some bureau.* I think a promotion list lasted for two years after the results of a civil-service exam were posted.
• Just because a contractor won a contract didn’t mean he or she was going to get work orders or get paid for the work orders he or she did get and completed. If you’re a contractor and you wanted 1) a continuous flow of work orders, and 2) timely payment for the work orders you completed, you’d better make it a habit of buying a table at the numerous fundraisers organized by the Republican Party throughout the year. A table comprised ten seats, and a seat typically cost $150.
• One year, a contractor won the concrete contract with a number of ridiculously low bids on a number of common concrete items. For instance, the bid price for a linear foot of concrete curb was a penny. If we gave this contractor a work order to replace 1,000 linear feet of curb, he would have to do the work and then bill us for $10. But for some reason, we didn’t give him any work orders for curb replacement. We gave him a lot of work orders for sidewalk replacement, though. What did this contractor bid for a square foot of sidewalk? Sixteen dollars—which was a ridiculously high bid for sidewalk replacement. Gee, I wonder how many tables this contractor purchased at Republican fundraisers?

Now, truth be told, none of the above corruption was explicit. There was no price list circulated for various goodies. No Republican bigwig ever looked anyone in the face and proposed a slimy quid pro quo: “Give me a thousand dollars and I will see that you get a merit raise.” But this nasty side of government was made known. Anyone new to the system, whether he or she was a new employee or a new contractor, quickly learned how the game of legal bribery was played. If you wanted something, your odds of getting that something increased dramatically by being a good source of revenue for the Republican Party.*

* Quick aside: My commie-lib readers would be wise to refrain from haughtiness. Republicans don’t have a monopoly on corruption. Democrats play the legal bribery game just as well as the Republicans do. And if you don’t believe me, check out Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, The Power Broker, or Secret Empires.

Why Government Is Plagued by Legal Bribery

My rinky-dink municipality on Long Island is hardly an outlier. Governments at the county, state, and federal levels are just as accomplished when it comes to legal bribery—the only difference being the number of zeroes attached to the legal bribes. Here are two examples of this disheartening reality I came across this past week:

Why? Why is government at every level plagued by legal bribery? Is it because government is a magnet for the morally bankrupt? Doubtful. The vast majority of people I worked for and with at my rinky-dink municipality were good people. And I’m sure the vast majority of people employed at higher levels of government are good people as well. One reason government is so susceptible to legal bribery is human nature. Man’s ability to rationalize far exceeds his ability to resist temptation. Give him a plausible excuse why his self-interest is synonymous with the common good and he will happily abandon his ethics. The biggest reason, however, has to do not with the nature of man but with the nature of government—particularly with the way government secures customers.

Government doesn’t secure customers the way Apple secures customers. Apple has to secure customers through voluntary exchange. It can’t force people to buy an iPhone. Government, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on voluntary exchange. It gets its customers by force. No homeowner in the jurisdiction of my rinky-dink municipality voluntarily paid for the services offered by my rinky-dink municipality. Every homeowner was conscripted. If he or she failed to pay his or her property tax, he or she would have lost his or her home.

Now a question: How dedicated would you be to the needs of your customers if you didn’t have to compete for your customers—your customers were forced to buy your product or service whether your product or service was good or bad?

If you answered that having conscripted customers would dull your dedication to excellence, go straight to the head of the class.

And this is exactly why government is plagued by legal bribery. Politicians, department heads, and union leaders aren’t penalized for taking their customers (i.e., the taxpayers) for granted. In fact, more often than not, they are rewarded with more revenue for treating their customers like crap. Except for policing, our corrupt punditry class never suggests that the answer to shoddy government is fewer tax dollars—it’s always more tax dollars. As such, those who wield power in the government are free to put their needs above the needs of the everyday taxpayers. At my rinky-dink municipality, those in power were far more concerned with enriching the Republican Party than with providing the everyday taxpayers with outstanding service. That’s why they monetized as much of their decision-making as possible, and that’s why the everyday taxpayers got 50 cents of service for every dollar in taxes they surrendered to my rinky-dink municipality (hyper-monetization of decision-making doesn’t breed operational excellence).

Quick aside: In theory, voting should be an effective check on legal bribery and all the other shenanigans our government officials busy themselves with. But that accountability tool just doesn’t work. We’ve been voting out the bad guys for nearly 250 years now, and the contempt government officials have for the taxpayers—especially as it relates to legal bribery—has never been worse.

The Question

When it comes to government, one of our biggest priorities should be answering this fundamental question: how do you get a government to make the needs of its customers paramount when said government doesn’t have to compete for said customers? In other words, how do you get government officials to pursue operational excellence—which is damn hard—when their livelihoods don’t depend on pursuing operational excellence?

When I was a graduate student at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, this fundamental question (i.e., The Question) never came up. Oh, sure, the problem of legal bribery was broached from time to time. But the school’s solution to legal bribery was always the same: voting (just elect saintly politicians) and campaign finance reform (as if legal bribery only took place within the context of elections). The notion that legal bribery has as much to do with the monopolistic and coercive nature of government as it does with the nature of man was as alien a notion as can be. The notion that political science should dedicate itself to addressing The Question was extremely alien as well. Nope, the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs was all about “justice” and hunting for more externalities to fix; that is, the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs was all about making the case for expanding the size and scope of government.

The Marxe School of Public and International Affairs could be an outlier, of course. Every other graduate school dedicated to public administration, including the Kennedy School of Government, might be ruminating fiercely over The Question. But I doubt it. If that were the case, The Question would be a routine feature of the campaign trail. Every politician would be heralding his or her solution to The Question. Debate moderators and voters would be peppering candidates with questions regarding The Question. And corporate news would be explaining how the party they favor is the only party fit to tackle The Question. What we see instead is mass ignorance. Our cultural elites, especially in Big Education, haven’t groomed us to be obsessed with The Question. They’ve groomed us to be obsessed with getting our “fair share” of government subsidies and handouts—the very attitude that leads to more government, more taxes (i.e., more intense taxpayer conscription), and more legal bribery.

Quick aside: The Groovy School of Government has a number of ways to effectively address The Question, and in the coming months, I, on behalf of the Groovy School of Government, will be sharing those ways.

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? I say government, because it has conscripted customers, is inherently flawed, and until we devise effective ways to check this inherent flaw, to make the preference for operational excellence as dear to government officials as it is to everyday taxpayers, government should be used as little as possible. Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.