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> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare

The guy who sold me my last car at my Toyota dealership was in his late 50s.

What's weird is that he told me that I would be his 1st sale!

I asked him what he did before and he said he was "in construction" but that it was a young man's game.

Something didn't add up and I googled his name.

Turns out that he was a former state police officer, ensnared in a fake overtime scandal. He served a prison sentence and lost his pension. I think the scandal nailed a few more cops, too.

> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare, that there's no need to do things like audit the books or to ask that there be a documented reason why this particular cop needed to do all that OT.

That is every large company I've ever worked at. It's not a government specific issue, it's an issue of large organizations.

>Whoever it is, that's always the case in government.

"government" here can be replaced with any sufficiently large organization. There's nothing special about corruption in overly sized organizations. We've just decided businesses get to do whatever they want because their grift is primary.

There's a counteracting force in non-government organizations though: competition and bankruptcy. Also, waste in non-government organizations hardly matters because they only get your money if you choose to give it to them.

Excluding of course corporate bailouts.

ok but the vast majority of businesses aren't lucky enough to expect those.

The government didn't bail out Kmart, or Spirit Airlines.

And when Washington Mutual got fire-saled to Chase, I don't think a lot of the decision-makers at corporate who got them into that mess got to keep their jobs.

I know corporate America has a lot of problems, but embezzlement and fraud at large scale can easily cause the company to die (problem solved). In government it just means they'll have to raise taxes again.

> but embezzlement and fraud at large scale can easily cause the company to die (problem solved)

The legitimate societal good that those corporations produced (useful products, valuable services, large scale employment, etc) are gone. The people responsible may lose their jobs, but if they get new jobs they are likely to just infect another corporation. Further, those responsible may have left long before the the institution buckled under the weight of their actions, and in the process convinced others to engage in the same practices. I reject the claim that the problem is solved by company death.

You're not wrong there. The bad actors still suck and ruin good companies and people's lives. I guess what I should have said it's the downside is limited in private business, compared to a public agency where they not only can raise taxes to make up for the losses, in many cases they're basically compelled to. Like, you can't just close the police or fire department if they lost so much money that we can't afford to run them in the current budget, so they'll borrow - regardless of the interest cost - and saddle the grandchildren of the current taxpayers with the bill.

Your take is naïve and over simplified at best. While there's argument to be made that shareholders of publicly traded cooperation perform the same "responsibility black hole" function as politicians and voters do for government but more importantly the exact failure modes tend to be different. Shitty governments just kinda limp along creating misery forever. There's very little pressure upon them to not suck compared to the alternatives. Companies tend to either go tits up or get acquired if they get real bad and they don't have captive markets to the same extent that governments do. Though of course companies are always trying to get the sorts of captive markets that governments have.

Musk is the richest man head of multiple large orgs.

Theres zero evidence that his destructive behaviors are checkrd any better than tge president. The fact that the richest man and current president suggests the typs of org is meaningless

> Shitty ________ just kinda limp along creating misery forever. There's very little pressure upon them to not suck compared to the alternatives.

US utility companies are like this. Railroad. Very large ISPs. Any org with some level of regulatory capture.

In non-government organizations, if you as a manager find out someone on your staff is scamming the company for a huge amount of money, you can choose to fire him and know that your P&L will improve, which is the metric you're evaluated by.

In government organizations, well, the manager is probably not "evaluated" at all (and certainly not on financial terms), rather just guaranteed promotions in title at certain milestones of not (being caught) committing official misconduct, and guaranteed a pension after X years of service. Why rock the boat by investigating rumors of misconduct of your subordinates?

This framing is so incredibly speculative and imaginary that it's barely above the level of conversation one would hear at 11:00pm between drunkards at the tavern.

> In non-government organizations, if you as a manager find out someone on your staff is scamming the company for a huge amount of money, you can choose to fire him and know that your P&L will improve, which is the metric you're evaluated by.

There are plenty of companies in the US that are essentially old boys clubs where you entrench yourself with political games and then spend your golden years playing solitaire in your corner office. This is pretty much the real American dream.

> Why rock the boat by investigating rumors of misconduct of your subordinates?

Why do anything good, ever? Why not just be the caricature of an evil, sneering bureaucrat chasing shiny pennies into your pension account?

The only distinction in this discussion that matters: public funds are "teh people's money". If an "old boys club" giant Fat Cats Inc. wants to spend their shareholder's money on hookers and blow, that's the shareholders problem. It was the shareholder's _choice_ to invest with company, _they took the risk_.

Municipal, state, and federal taxes are mandatory: you do not have a choice.

It's my view that, just like if we lived in a hunter-gatherer society, ideally everyone would strive to authentically contribute their fair share.

Money flows in very complicated ways and "shareholder's choice" is a technicality, especially in a world filled with monopolies, oligopolies, natural resource speculation and extraction, broad-based index funds, government subsidies, regulatory capture, and all manners of rent-seeking.

Economic deadweight is economic deadweight, no matter the source of funding: whether its a 30 year old widower of three at the grocery store cash register paying their dues to the oil barons who happen to own the land above which the oil is pulled, or the 50 year old executive who pays a 16% effective tax rate to ensure that the speech pathologist has their own office at the local school to help a child learn to cope with their stutter.

It's possible to rationalize anything.

Unless you’ve worked in government, honestly, just stop.

I spent years in a metro water system and this class of corruption is rampant. You get 90k maximum salary, but your last 5 years dictate your retirement… so guess what you find yourself with maximum overtime.

We tried to fire an employee for cause… who hired counsel, so we caved immediately because of optics. So we gave them a do nothing barely-show-up job for the last 7 years.

I personally went on a death march for 12+ hour days for 6 months, 7 days a week, off the clock and without compensation, only to be screwed out of my “accrued” PTO. The VP, two years from retirement, suffered not a bit of repercussion for this violation.

The public sector is rife with corruption, no question, but if you worship it as your God, you’ll have to look past this sacrilege to find the truth.

I make these arguments because privatization is not a panacea, as the subtext of many of these types of would imply, but not because I "worship the public sector as a God".

For some reason, many critics of the public sector are willing to look past the many inefficiencies of our private sectors, especially the anticompetive and rent seeking practices.

The public sector needs solutions to its unique problems, it does not need to be eliminated entirely with privatization.

I'm not a privatization crusader either. But I do detest the hideous amount of waste in our municipal, state, and federal governments, and argue that it's a very hard problem to solve, and that we should never feed that beast by entrusting more things to them than they already control and mismanage.

Most companies where corruption significantly defrauds the owner (shareholders, for public companies), there's a strong chance it'll get shut down. That incentive simply doesn't happen when it's just taxpayers being fleeced. Otherwise, how else do you explain Sacramento?

Your anecdotal story is perfectly representative of all govt entities, surely.