You know, I grew up hearing it repeated as Gospel that government was way less efficient than the private sector.\u00a0 I guess that\u2019s why we\u2019re hiring private contractors to fight our wars.\u00a0 Why we want to pay corporations to run our schools, run our jails, maybe even\u00a0 ramrod our fire and police departments.\u00a0 They\u2019ll naturally do a better job for way less money.
\nI\u2019m no economist, but I need more than mantras to make me want to dismantle half of society by gutting and cutting government like it was a sacrificial cow on the altar of unbridled capitalism.\u00a0 Wasn\u2019t it GM and Ford and Chrysler, bastions, capitol B, of capitalism that just got bailed out by the federal government?\u00a0 Not just bailed out, propped up, given CPR, put on life support,\u00a0 brought back to life \u2026.Oh, and brought back to profitability.<\/p>\n
And maybe my memory is slipping, but wasn\u2019t it the banks, the mortgage companies, the credit firms who drove this country into the worst recession in more than half a century?\u00a0 Maybe they were what?\u00a0 Too<\/em> efficient?\u00a0 Too something, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n We complain about government but I don\u2019t see the heads of\u00a0 government agencies or departments pulling down multi-million dollar salaries with huge mega-bonuses and sweetdeal stock options.\u00a0 I guess if we ran them like businesses, we\u2019d inflate that executive pay by, oh, a hundred times or so.\u00a0 See how that helps efficiency.\u00a0 Sort of like paying military contractors way more than our military men and women — maybe why we take 10 years to lose wars now.<\/p>\n So before I wrapped myself in the American flag and started dismantling all our government departments and offer them up like railroad right of ways to the corporations, I\u2019d follow the money a ways and see who exactly is going to profit from that supposed increased performance.\u00a0 Call me cynical and paint a bullseye on my be-hind, but I suspect it\u2019s some of the fellows in corner suites at the top of Wall Street skyscrapers.\u00a0 Even if profits don\u2019t\u00a0 go up, they\u2019ll get a nice bloated\u00a0package, you bet.\u00a0 Efficiently wrapped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You know, I grew up hearing it repeated as Gospel that government was way less efficient than the private sector.\u00a0 I guess that\u2019s why we\u2019re hiring private contractors to fight our wars.\u00a0 Why we want to pay corporations to run our schools, run our jails, maybe even\u00a0 ramrod our fire and police departments.\u00a0 They\u2019ll naturally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[7265,7267,7266],"class_list":["post-19019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-corporate-vs-government","tag-gutting-government","tag-privatize-this"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19020,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19019\/revisions\/19020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}