The lie of "Big Government"
This seems to be the last "reasonable" plank of conservatism left. Once positions based on bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia and religious dogma are discounted; the only two planks of conservatism that remain, seem to be economic ones. One is that "Big Government" is wasteful and inefficient, and the other is that poor and working class people in America benefit economically from dramatically lowering the taxes of the rich and the super-rich. The second of these two propositions seems to be collapsing under its own weight, but the first remains firmly entrenched, fully accepted as fact by all conservatives, most moderates and even a fair number of progressives. I think it is critical for the progressive movement to begin work to show this proposition for what it is... At best, an outrageous exaggeration, and at worst, a complete fabrication.
It must have started during the Regan Administration. Or maybe that’s just when I became politically aware and first noticed it. I remember hearing the Republicans bad mouthing "Big Government"; denouncing "wasteful" government spending; espousing the benefits of "privatization" and "outsourcing" government work. Private enterprise, it was apparently argued, was so much more efficient that it just made sense to let private companies do all the work of the government possible. Amtrak and the Postal Service were privatized, followed by almost ever imaginable function of Federal, State and Local governments, prisons, schools, road building, urban planning, etc...
I wonder where this notion came from? Where did the overwhelming universal idea that work done by government employees was done so much less efficiently than similar work done by private sector employees originate? Of course, there were the anecdotal stories of the $200 toilet seats, insanely restrictive rules governing workplace safety and employee benefits, the slow pace of work, apparent laziness and ineptitude of government workers, etc. But were there ever any real documented studies or data of any sort to support the idea that there was a real measurable difference in the efficiency of work done privately vs. publicly? Not that I’ve ever seen or heard tell of. I doubt there ever was.
I have no federal studies, no scientific data to support my opinions (as I said I don’t think there are any), but I do have my own 25 years of experience and memories to draw on. Here’s how my take on the entire theory of "Big Government" developed.
I worked for a state Department of Transportation at the time this got started in the mid 1980’s. I was an engineer and I designed roadways and did urban planning. I saw the slow, relaxed atmosphere of my fellow government workers, the minor sources of waste, the bureaucracy that seemed to make the jobs take longer than they should. To my 22 year old eyes, the talk of wasteful government spending and bloated bureaucracies seemed all too obvious. When the small government euphoria reached my area of the country, I was laid off as my job was outsourced to private engineering consulting firms and I immediately got a job with one of them, doing the exact same work I had been doing along with a 25% pay raise and a substantially inferior benefits package than I had with the state. Over the next 20 years I have changed jobs several times, back and forth from private sector to government work more-or-less in the same field. At first, I saw that in the private sector everyone seemed to work much harder, putting in longer hours, dealing with seemingly short deadlines, so that, on the surface, the important work of maintaining our country’s infrastructure seemed to be getting done much more efficiently than it had before the work had been outsourced. Then as I aged and moved upward through the ranks toward management level positions within private firms, I started seeing more and more of the picture.
First of all I was forgetting the profit margin. Of course, private engineering firms had to make a profit, whereas government engineering department did not. So right off the bat the private sector work was starting out 5% to 10% behind any work done by public workers. Of course, part of this profit margin goes to improving the company, buying new computers, equipment, software, etc. to make the work more efficient, but an awful lot of it went directly to paying outrageously high salaries to the small group of folks that owned the firm and/or to benefit the stockholders. Did that 5% to 10% offset the waste I saw as a state employee? I’m not sure.
Then, after several years of working in the private sector, I began to understand that employees of companies aren’t actually working all that much harder than their counterparts in the public sector. They just looked busier. Back then, in the public sector you rarely worried about being fired or disciplined for not being busy every moment of the day, so many folks did not develop the habit of working very hard at looking busy. After working in the private sector for a few years I began to see the through the facade. Folks working for private companies weren’t actually busy ever minute of every day either, and often it was pretty darn difficult to determine who was an effective and efficient worker from who was not. (See any book of Dilbert cartoons for specific examples).
Then there was the bureaucracy. Surely jobs done in the private sector got done faster, decisions were streamlined, and the bureaucracy was minimized. All to the good, right? That’s what I thought too, at first. Then I started to see what the purpose of the bureaucracy was. It was to prevent mistakes, bad decisions, graft, corruption, conflicts of interest. In the private sector such restraints were relaxed. Decisions could be made in days or weeks instead of months or years by eliminating many levels of scrutiny. Good for efficiency, bad for quality control. Roads get built in less than optimum locations, corners are cut, and roads that should last for 50 years start to fall apart in 25, pressure mounts to build roads in way and locations that will benefit certain wealthy landowners and politicians. All things that are extremely hard to measure. A road built with a slightly less than optimum design or location costs the public, of course, but how much? No-one knows. Slightly more traffic, slightly more expensive design, slightly more waste. How much more... 1%, 5%... I don’t know, but it’s definitely there.
Then I started seeing the politics of this new system. The Engineering and Construction firms that were now making so much more money because they were the recipients of this "outsourced work" were donating lots of money to Republican politicians. K-street has nothing on the money that flows back and forth in the public works and infrastructure sectors. Don’t think so? Remember what crimes Spiro Agnew eventually had to resign because of? I saw time after time politicians and business owners collude to make small fortunes on land deals in advance of new "public" construction projects. Did this sort of thing go on before "Privatization" became the norm? Probably. But one does not have to be a Federal prosecutor to see how moving the planning and design functions to private firms would make it a hell of a lot easier. I saw the head of TxDOT become a multimillionaire from real estate deals in a few years on the job and then (backed by corporate construction money) become mayor of Houston. I saw several politicians and their business partners make tens of millions on the construction of Camden Yards Stadium in Baltimore.
This is just my own little corner of the world, but I can also think I see the same thing in many other areas of life. Outsourcing medical care at Walter Reed, functions of FEMA, military contractors, Halliburton, the EPA, FDA, VA, public schools, Prisons (I’m in Texas), etc. etc...
So now, I add it all up and look at both systems, and I’m convinced that there was never any more waste and inefficiency in public work than there is in private sector work. If anything, there is a lot more waste, inefficiency, graft, corruption and outright theft in work that is outsourced. This has been a 25 year long experiment that has been a dismal failure. And it’s partially our fault for accepting this big lie at face value. It has cost our society untold trillions of dollars and will continue to do so for many years to come.
Sure, I can imagine some limited ways in which privatization and outsourcing can be effective, but we have gone a hundred times too far. It’s become the biggest form of corporate welfare there is. Privatization and the myth of Big Government was the biggest fraud every perpetrated on America, and it was done specifically to funnel money, power and decisions making ability away from elected officials and fair, rational and expert public servants, and into the hands of a tiny number corporate elite and ultra wealthy power brokers.
In the last 2 or 3 years, it has become OK for people and even politicians to be "liberal" again. We need to now make it OK for people and politicians to support "Big Government" once again. We need to attack this lie at every opportunity. Sully it, question it, destroy the assumptions that it stands upon, make it safe for our progressive leaders to speak of it in the same way we can speak of trickle down economics - as a lie designed to make the rich even richer. It will take many years but I’m convinced that we must eventually drive a stake through the heart of this lie at all levels of government.