And They Want to Be Our Health Care Providers

In 2002, Caltrans (California Department of Transportation ) began the construction of a new eastern span of the Bay Bridge. The estimated cost was $1.3 billion dollars. The plan? To rebuild rather than retrofit the span after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 caused a section of the bridge to collapse.

After a series of delays and cost overruns the bridge is now expected to be complete in 2013 at a total cost to taxpayers of $6.3 billion. Just $5 billion or 384% over budget. That was before the break in a steel cable on the new section which was recently inserted into the old span. The bridge is closed indefinitely until the cable is repaired. Caltrans does not have an estimate of when the repairs will be complete.

But there is good news in all of this we are told. Caltrans has the parts to fix the problem on hand. Yippee.

When have you known the government to finish anything on time or on budget? The CEO of the bridge project--if a member of the private sector--would have lost his job by now and if Pay Czar Feinberg had anything to say about it would have to give his salary back. Yet the Caltrans folks keep plugging along: $5 billion over budget, years behind schedule and now, it appears, being paid to fix a broken cable that should never have snapped in the first place.

Now tell me, do you want these unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of your health care?

It is amazing to me that people do not understand that government and even larger, dominant businesses are incapable of producing optimum services and/or goods because such systems lack the means and motivation to identify and reward merit and meritorious performance.

Such deficiency exists because governments and large businesses prohibit the easy development of competitors AND because they quickly become overwhelmed by the political urge to operate as "spoils" and/or "patronage" systems, in which meritorious performance is ignored in favor of the allocation of jobs based on power, loyalty and nepotism.

The perfect environment for understanding how market competition works is in observing small business (restaurants are a great example). If one business is outdone by another in terms of the best product vis-a-vis price, it is quickly replaced by the challenger.

When barriers are built to prevent this competition, the quality per price of output declines proportionately.

In governments, small towns have the greatest competition in that customers (in this case residents) can move outside the city limits. Please note that even this relatively easy to circumvent barrier to competition still has devastating impact on the performance of the organization. Even small towns are notoriously political and just plain awful in their delivery of services.

Big cities and states are dramatically worse...and the U.S. Government is simply deplorable with some organizational exceptions.

As an exception, that part of the military that comes in contact with an enemy is driven by the competition of battle to seek optimum performance. But those parts of the military which are increasingly distant from the front lines (i.e. battle) lose their competitive edge in a direct relation with such distance.

Our elected officials are, for the most part, oblivious to the need for competition because they have spent their careers building barriers to it instead of being improved by it.

They hate the free market and in Obama, a man who has been steeped in anti-market indoctrination since childhood, they have found their hero...the leader (?) they need to help them achieve their goals of killing the free markets and the competition it produces.

They overlook two things:

as pointed out above, the government cannot replace the free market because it cannot produce the goods and services in terms of the quality and price demanded by the citizenry, and second...
the free market will not die, it will simply go underground and will re-emerge and thrive in the black market.

All that said, what is happening in Washington, however much it will ultimately fail IMO, will spark a second revolution.

VIVA LA REVOLUCION!!!

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