Have You Ever Noticed
Have you ever noticed that when budgets are tight the State always talks about cutting ambulance service, police patrols, jury trials or fire houses but they never talk about cutting the Acupuncture Licensing Board? Yeah, so did Jacob Sullum.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
So much of government spending seems arbitrary and borderline obscene, just like in the private business world. I’m all for cutting waste, but I don’t support the libertarian’s answers either.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
The difference is that a business that wastes money hurts itself. I am no crazed libertarian, but I will be amazed if say three states couldn’t share a Boxing Commisioner or Acupuncture Board. These things may actually need to be looked at now an then, but does it really require constant money while the entire system of trial by jury is shut down to save cash?
December 16th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Well, I’m sorry to point it out, but the Acupuncture Licensing Board is a 5 member _unpaid_ organization with no offices. Consequently, it costs the state government very little or nothing. All of the other of the examples that I checked in Sullum’s list are similar, costing little (mileage expenses, maybe) or nothing. It’s kind of the same as the old programming adage about not optimizing code that you don’t execute.
December 16th, 2008 at 6:50 am
Ahh well, shut down trials by jury and ambulance service then, no waste in that state.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying their budget cutting decisions are good ones. Like most government, I bet there are a lot of expensive pet projects that could be cut. I just don’t think they’ll have funny names.
December 16th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Or, there may be “perks” that are hidden here and there that could be cut instead. MCPS has come under scrutiny lately for this – money gets spent all the time that is not accounted for.
December 16th, 2008 at 9:52 am
That is also very true. The simple fact is a business has to sell something. If they all want the newest computers or executive assistants, they have to pay for them from sales or if you are a wall street bank from financial scams but the money still has to come from somewhere.
The government doesn’t they just have to have us give them more. When sales are down for businesses things get cut, they have a strong incentive to find the less productive things and cut there as if they cut the good stuff, they lose more sales.
Rather than look for useless costs, the government has a strong incentive to look for useful and important things to threaten so that we will pay more. They threaten exactly the things a business would never threaten because we don’t have any choice but get our trials and civic services from them. So we grumble and pay and the waste just sits there.
Where I get off the libertarian train is that I think that many of the functions the government does really are better done by a central government rather than by the pure market. However I find it maddening that we can find no ways to put real incentive into the system for real management of costs.
I know many, many hard working folks in the government, but I also know of many people who fill jobs that aren’t really there, they are make work or space filler jobs in the government. In an efficient system those positions would go before the Jury trails and ambulance service, but currently those jobs are unreachable, which leads the people in the jobs into deadend frustration and costs the tax payers obscene amounts.