Hayek would agree. It's better to let resources be used efficiently than to create artificial demand via subsidies.
2. Be angry that government is inefficient.
3. Goto step 1.
Have you been to (the equivalent of) DMV in other countries?
So let's say that the government produces one driver's license per $100, and I'm angry that it costs that much. Your proposal is that I will be happy if I instead spend $120 per license?
In that case the GP would be talking about appropriating more money for more DMV employees so that people could be done with their business their more expeditiously.
In your case, you're talking about monetary efficiency which is a different thing and might be better served by less employees serving the people.
And I guess it's up to society to decide where that line should be drawn in terms of both monetary efficiency for the tax payer and temporal efficiency for the person waiting in line.
1. Recognize "government is inefficient"
2. Use as an excuse to give the inefficient more with which to be inefficient
3. Goto step 1
Recognizing people are bad at some things doesn't mean it's a money problem nor does it mean that comparing different environments is apt.
2. Remove a stick of RAM from your computer to teach it a lesson
3. Get mad that your computer didn't magically do more with less
Far too often the solution is to continue removing RAM in the hopes that the inefficient process magically fixes itself. It rarely does.
There are certainly ways they could make the DMV more efficient, but don't mistake the almost universal unpleasantness of DMVs for inefficiency.
My experience tells me entity-scale is the main variable that determines efficient use of resources (all other things being equal), rather than private/public sector divide.
Which makes sense if you think about it: once you get away from small groups and sole individuals being able to give all things their attention, a private company has to effectively re-implement a form of government to operate internally.
While it may arguably be the main variable, and definitely the main variable within a sector, it shouldn't be used to discount the importance of goals/motivations/incentives. Although there are plenty of examples to the contrary in either direction, I think most also with experience would agree there is more waste and less accountability on one side compared to the other.
I can't really agree with the "more waste and less accountability on one side compared to the other", but that's primarily because the terms/measurements are so poorly defined and they differ so much country to country, state to state and with subject matter, and as I said, I believe that as institutions grow/mature, private industry must implement government anyway.
I guess what i'd rail against most is the idea that its the private/public idea itself that plays the significant part in efficiency and productivity: the idea that subsidising private industry, public-private partnerships, or privatising certain public roles or firms/industries somehow magically, by itself, makes things "more efficient".
If i were to reflect back on my own career, of the three top efficient organizations, two were medium-sized government departments, and the third was a small team non-profit of about 5 on a small government funding arrangement. Worst three were all private industry: big corp, big consultancy, little firm (although, admittedly, funded by government). Private industry had a huge problem with people being motivated by profits, rather than doing the job: hence directly incentivizing a seeking of inefficiency if not in a fully competitive market (which in the real world, is most markets these days, and certainly most markets with players of any scale).
There's a couple of throw-away populist lines I could give about the secret of efficiency I've observed, but i'll chose three: motivation/incentives, devolve responsibility down to the person best able to make the decision, and preference hands off and less work over more (which, to me, is almost the secret success of efficient free-market economies, the ability to just step back and use organic structures to just let things happen).
The comment about size is spot on. Two things going on.
Management at scale means trying to get 10,000 monkey's pointed mostly in the same direction[1]. There are huge governance issues with that. Private public does not matter[2]. Large organizations without these controls will eventually lose coherence and flame out.
However that mass has a quality of it it's own is in play. 10,000 monkeys can manage extremely large 'streams' of effort and punch way above the weight of the sum of all monkeys. In spite of the lack of efficiency.
[1] If you wonder why management isn't interested in your shiny new idea and wants you to to get back to work, that's why.
[2] If anything your local government is more interested in your complaints than say the cable company.
The problem is these "temporary" gov programs never end. And then eventually they live long past their prime.
Furthermore, as the become the new normal they tend to create unintended consequence. For example, farm subsidies for corn drove down the price of high fructose corn syrup. That made the sweetener ubiquitous.
Similar can be said for home loans and student loans. Once these programs take on a life of their own, the market becomes distorted and eventually bad - unforeseen - things happen.
I wish everyone competed in a free market (for the most part), but the energy market is not that.
They encourage different short term effects but they're both contributing to the same effect.
All that said, the subsidies in this case far outweighed the effect the tax would have had.
For example, you can make electric cars more appealing by increaing the tax on gas.
Where things get ugly is when the incentives are in conflict. Again, oil is subsidized and then taxed. Big Oil wins. Gov wins. Consumers - who pay the subsidy and the tax - lose.
Without a strong hand in regulation, dominant companies get fat and lazy, destroying anything in their path. Imagine the potential that would have been lost had the original AT&T not been under the yoke of regulation. The internet and the immense wealth it has created would never had existed. You’d be paying $300/mo for some ISDN style Western Electric modem to access AT&T’s version of AOL.
Look no further than the shitshow that is Facebook and Twitter for what happens when you let the free market run. We’ve brought back white supremacy and god knows what else in pursuit of user engagement.
Any idea what the energy market in Germany would have looked like absent subsidies entirely?
For those employed by the inefficient business that will no longer be subsidized, well, it may not be better for them, at least not in the short run.
Tragedy of the commons is an issue, but subsidizing a coal mine doesn't seem much like a tragedy of the commons issue to me. It seems more like your last words: a "political optimum", that is, something that produced votes, because the mine owners and workers want the subsidies much more strongly than the taxpayers want to not have to pay. That may be politically optimum, but it's not morally, socially, or economically optimum.
Nations have other motives than economic efficiency. The state should lead the market to meet national goals like clean energy infrastructure.
Coal subsidies are a way to increase military strength, or at least they used to be. War needs steel needs coal. That may no longer be the case with more advanced ways of creating steel without coal.
In a parallel comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736465), I said that giving money to those unable to compete "seems almost certain to be wasteful". I chose those words very carefully. I was thinking about food security rather than steel for war, but I was very deliberately leaving an escape hatch that, yes, sometimes you actually do want the inefficiency for other reasons.