"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.
US utility companies are like this. Railroad. Very large ISPs. Any org with some level of regulatory capture.
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
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
Municipal, state, and federal taxes are mandatory: you do not have a choice.
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.
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.
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.