Don't let the government try to "lower the price" on anything
I met a new couple last night at the Elks Lodge who were traveling through in their RV on their way up to Canada before that part of the world becomes impossibly cold, as they put it. We talked about a lot of things with them and the regulars at the Elks and it is really common for people to just be passing through, especially with their RV's.
These two had both been in the military and were in their mid 60's and as tends to be the case at the Elks, they were conservative. A little too mouthy about how conservative they were if you ask me. This sort of thing isn't going to get you in an argument at the Elks Lodge, because I am very aware of how much of an echo chamber that place is.
During our conversation the man in the couple had experience working on government projects and we had a lot in common as far as that was concerned as we both had the same recollection of how the government functions when it comes to money. He had a meme on his phone that made me laugh so much that I went and found it as well because it is a perfect representation of how the government operates in a financials sense and now i am going to share it with you.
There are a couple of reasons why I love this: I am a big fan of Beeker and the image says it all, especially if what Beeker is holding in that picture turns out to be something that is highly flammable and he is about to spray that fire with it.
Whenever the government talks about how they are going to use money in order to make the prices of something go down, like they are talking about doing with inflation and student loans right now, you can be all-but-guaranteed that two things are going to happen. The price of said thing is NOT going to go down and that money is going to be pilfered by people who don't really even need it. As a result, they are going to make whatever the bad situation happens to be even worse.
I don't know where this notion of anytime something is going badly that if we just throw money at it that it will make the situation better. I would love to hear of some examples where that actually succeeded. Throwing money at something whose root cause actually COMES from money is just poor reasoning and this is before we get into the very obvious situation that the government is absolutely terrible at managing money. Of all the governments that exist in the world that I am aware of they tend to be incredibly inefficient machines because of the fact that they never have to worry about going out of business by spending unwisely. If they run out of money, they just point the finger at whoever the "other guy" happens to be at the time and then they get more money.
No private business operates like this and if they tried to, they wouldn't be around for very long regardless of how deep their pockets were.
Any time that some politician, regardless of what party they are, talks about throwing billions of dollars at something because it will be good for "regular Americans," whatever that even means, I feel extreme confidence that this money will accomplish nothing. Sure, they'll find a way to present some statistics to indicate that what they did worked, but the people on the ground who are supposed to feel whatever relief that was told to them they would receive, they never feel it.
Don't let the government convince you that if "we just passed this bill to spend this money that everything will be ok." I can't think of a single time in my life that this sort of thing ever resulted in anything good coming from it. The government is good at only two things: War and taxes. If we want a problem to be solved it will have to be done by the people themselves and by allowing the people to keep more of their money, because of lack of taxes, things have a way of working themselves out.
Government inefficiency comes from two places: organizational entropy and patronage.
Organizational entropy is something you can observe in the private sector. As someone who works for a small company, and therefore has multiple jobs, it's obvious when we deal with larger companies where everyone has one job, especially shipyards (they are probably one of the least efficient businesses). A small company like ours can turn on a dime because it isn't compartmentalized and doesn't have a rigid hierarchy. The sales, order processing, order filling, and shipment is done by the same people. In larger companies these are broken up into departments. There are separate people for sales, purchasing (called purchasing agents), order fulfilment (e.g. warehouse workers and stockroom workers), and shipping and receiving along with multiple layers of management. These increased complexities not only create much more lag time between review, approval and execution but also means there are more chances for communication between people and departments to break down and lead to more errors and deadweight.
Patronage is also something that occurs in the private sector but it's mediated by competition and the necessity of reducing costs or quality of service to stay relevant. Of course, no such incentive exists for monopolies. When everyone's objective is to bring home as much pork as possible for their constituents and special interest groups you will inevitably get convoluted bills and inflated costs that far exceed the original design.
another wonderful response from you. I always learn a thing or two when you chime in buddy. Thanks for that.
I can totally identify with what your are saying about organizational entropy and have witnessed it first-hand anytime I deal with government contracts. It seems as though it is almost always "someone else's job" whenever we talk to anyone. Even the government project managers I have met on larger worksites seem to not really have a clue about anything that is going on, let alone be capable of actually doing the work themselves if it came down to it. There is probably some regulation that makes it illegal for them to do so.
In my business, almost everyone on our sites is capable of doing the job of almost anyone else on that site as well and if we run into a hitch in our planning, we can move resources to another part of the job so that it doesn't get log-jammed. Of course my crew is less than 50 people but I don't see why this couldn't be applied to larger organizations as well.
You forgot targeted murder (outside of war)
oh right. They are good at that too