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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

>> It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government.

This is precisely the conservative game plan though: starve the government of funds, force it to outsource as much as possible to the private sector, then when projects end up delayed and overbudget (or failing), point to lack of government efficiency and competence to justify further funding cuts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

This has been happening since basically the Reagan era.

>> Surely the solution to criticism of government inefficiency is for government to operate well.

No organization can operate well if it doesn't have necessary levels of funding, and the government is no exception. Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies, which often times manifest as lack of inhouse expertise that can provide strict analysis of and oversight for projects outsourced to the private sector.

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> Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies

San Francisco? Lack of funding? $14 billion isn't enough?

The budget of San Francisco has roughly doubled in about the last ten years: is the government now twice as good at whatever it's supposed to do than it was ten years ago?

If anything the problem with San Francisco is that there is so much money that an entire ecosystem of nonprofits and contractors has evolved to feed off those funds.

The expression is "not enough money to do it right, but enough to do it twice".

You can easily blow out a budget with foolish upfront attempts to save money.

> Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies

No, the primary cause is politicians promising things that sound good so that they'll get reelected, because that's the number one thing they care about, not efficiency. On the other hand a private company will only build something that makes economical sense.

Yes, if lack of funding is the primary cause, then the federal government should be quite effective indeed, considering how much money it receives and spends.

government agencies are the only ones that get MORE money when they fail to deliver

> On the other hand a private company will only build something that makes economical sense.

Yes, economical sense to the company. But not all things that are good for society make economic sense for companies.

"makes economic sense" is not a useful metric to build society on. There are so many things in our day to day life that should be considered well beyond "does this make a profit"

like what?

How does that explain the situation in deep blue states with respect to services such as transit and education that are primarily state funded? Is the ghost of Reagan haunting California and keeping San Francisco from having well funded, efficient services like Copenhagen?

Hasn't the beast has grown far larger and more obese since then?

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