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Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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