| Squilliam said: I wonder how many people complain because the U.S. government is inefficient. Would the same issues be raised if the people here were from Australia for instance? |
I’m from Canada, and while there are areas where our government does a dramatically better job (education), I see the same kinds of incompetence and inefficiency across all levels of government in Canada that plague the United States; and I believe incompetence and inefficiency is a characteristic of all governments.
Consider that when a private organization sees a reduction in income they have an incentive to improve efficiency to maintain the quality of their services in order to prevent their competition from stealing their customers. In contrast, when a public organization sees a reduction in income there is an incentive to become less efficient and to make cuts in the most noticeable way possible so that the funding will get returned. This is why teachers are always the first to lose their job (and often the only people to lose their job) when education funding is cut even though the cost of bureaucracy has been estimated as high as 33% of the cost of education in some systems.
