News

Is government more efficient than the private sector?

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When it comes to providing quality services at the lowest cost, private firms are very different from government bureaucracies. A private firm has to compete in an open marketplace where consumers are free to shop around for the best deal. So a private firm has to provide more quality at a lower price or consumers will take their business to a competitor! And the owners and employees share in the profits or losses. They have an incentive to cut costs, raise quality and lower prices. They have a stake in pleasing the customer.

But what about government? Do they have competitors that pressure them lower costs and raise quality? Do the people who run the government benefit financially if they please customers? Do employees of the government benefit if they please customers? Do customers have the freedom to buy from someone else if they are not happy with the price or quality of government services?

Consider this Washington Times story. (H/T John Stossel via ECM)

Excerpt:

An audit of the government’s legal aid program for the poor concluded Monday that the purchase of more than $188,000 worth of imported Italian stone to decorate one of the program’s office buildings in Texas was unnecessary and excessive…

The inspector general of the Legal Services Corp.(LSC) said the stone, which adorns three full stories of a newly remodeled Fort Worth office building, “appears only to be decorative in nature” and does not constitute a “reasonable and necessary” expense.

If a private firm wasted money like this, they would go out of business. The directors and employees who run private firms never waste money like this! If they did, the private firm would go out of business. But the government wastes money like this all the time. It’s not their money, after all – it’s your money. Why should they spend it wisely? What’s in it for them?

And they’re aren’t exactly accountable when they get caught wasting taxpayer money, either.

The inspector general quoted officials involved with the Texas program as defending the purchase, saying the high-end imported stone was selected for its beautiful finish and installed as a decorative flourish.

And this applies to government-run health care, too. Why should be expect government to cut health care costs when they have no incentive to be efficient? Private firms have an incentive – to keep their jobs, to be promoted, to get raises, etc. Government has no incentive to be efficient.

Commentary

Why are sentences for domestic violence committed by women so lenient?

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ECM sent me this article by Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

I feel terrible about how unfairly men are treated when they are victims of domestic violence. I think that a lot of men are going to be put off of marriage  when stories like the ones in the article become widely known.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Mothers who kill their children often serve little jail time. Gender stereotypes lead people to believe that any woman who kills her kid must have done so as a result of duress or insanity. Andrea Yates ultimately escaped punishment after methodically drowning her five children one by one in a bathtub. A Prince William County woman guilty of stabbing her five daughters received less than three years in jail (after her lawyer ridiculously claimed the children should not be deprived of their mother!).

A woman who used poison to paralyze her daughter, enabling her husband to then kick her conscious-but-immobilized daughter to death, escaped penalty by pleading “battered woman syndrome.”

[…]Battered woman syndrome has become an excuse to kill not only children, but also innocent non-relatives. A California woman got her lover to kill an innocent man by falsely telling him that the man was her paramour. She then had her murder conviction overturned by the California Court of Appeal. How? She claimed that “battered women’s syndrome” made her do it.

[…]According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ study of large urban counties, wives who kill their husbands without provocation get only seven years in prison, on average, compared to a more reasonable 17 years in prison for husbands who kill their wives without provocation.

[…]For a glaring example of gender bias in the courts (and the media), you need look no further than The Washington Post story by Tamara Jones, in which she commiserates with convicted felon Teressa Turner-Schaefer, who spent a mere 11 months in jail for killing her husband after an argument.

Now Turner-Schaefer gets to collect $400,000 in life insurance for killing her husband. In a plea bargain, she pleaded guilty to the crime of involuntary manslaughter, which, amazingly enough, doesn’t bar you from collecting life insurance taken out on the person you killed.

There are many more horrible stories in the article about children and men being assaulted and murdered by women. The crimes are not being punished fairly. It discourages me greatly that most women don’t seem to be up in arms defending men when injustices like this happen. Actually, the man is usually blamed for the violence committed against him by the woman.

I think it is particularly shocking how Christians have nothing to say about this.

News

The increase in tropical storms and hurricanes is NOT due to global warming

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NASA’s NOAA notes a new study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate. (H/T Watts Up With That via ECM)

Excerpt:

A NOAA-led team of scientists has found that the apparent increase in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes since the late 19th and early 20th centuries is likely attributable to improvements in observational tools and analysis techniques that better detect short-lived storms.

The new study, reported in the online edition of the American Meteorological Society’s peer-reviewed Journal of Climate, shows that short-lived tropical storms and hurricanes, defined as lasting two days or less, have increased from less than one per year to about five per year from 1878 to 2008.

“The recent jump in the number of short-lived systems is likely a consequence of improvements in observational tools and analysis techniques,” said Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami, and lead author on the study. “The team is not aware of any natural variability or greenhouse warming-induced climate change that would affect the short-lived tropical storms exclusively.”

[…]When the researchers discounted the number of short-lived tropical storms and hurricanes and added the estimated number of missed medium- to long-lived storms to the historical hurricane data, they found no significant long-term trend in the total number of storms.

The paper is online at the NOAA.gov web site.