i dont have any data to be so hard on civil servants. it’s just been my experience that it’s easier to unload nonperforming employees in private sector than non profit or public. i work for a private company doing contracts generally for public or non profits. i’m not getting rich, i’m not lining my pocket, i have job insecurity and performance based rewards. and yet the people i have to deal with in accomplishing my goals have been for the most part far too involved in politics and cya (cover your ass).
i’m a firm believer of public services like education and city management. but the level, the quality of service is so bad, due in large part to what i think is that cya/politics that i see and despise. for instance, a large california government service had issued a billion dollar bond some 5 years ago to deal with infrastructure upgrades. and yet they’ve been sitting on their assessment data, not doing a damn thing because they can’t figure out what the data means. so they spend millions more in order to reassess the situation, reevaluate their conditions and issue a new bond. meanwhile, the people dependant on the service are going without and money is being wasted on bobblehead fucks that can’t get fired for being leech like parasites.
ok, so we’ve recently seen the likes of orangillo and stanly also quite orange’neal get canned in the private sector. and they got their multi million dollar parachutes. but the fact that the squids in government are doing their utterly pathetic best to bail out these banks is a testament to the worthlessness of douchebags who can’t get fired.
you and i are sitting on opposite sides of this fence. i see the incompetence of public employees, you see the graft of private. and i agree with you, there is so much graft in public contracts. but it’s precisely because of the incompetence of the civils that the graft goes on; the management of civils is so fractured because canning non performing employees is so difficult. you have to work around them, you have to swim through bureaucracy thick as molassas, you have bobbleheads all sticking their thumb in the pie and wanting their say…
yes, private companies can also be run this way. but private companies are private and not tax payer run. for the majority of companies, that’s small and middle size without institutional support. which means sink or swim. and yet, the large companies and corporations that mimic public sector politics and cya are the ones that tend to land the government contracts. how sick is that? you (public sector) don’t want to hire a full time expert to do a job and instead spend millions on a contractor to “do the job right” when you should have just done it yourself… that is the kind of graft that you see and the kind of mismanagement that i see.
