[BBell]

After Hurricane Katrina a company was hired to rebuild the twin span over lake Pontchartrain. The company was offered a bonus for every day they finished ahead of schedule. The company in turn offered the workers a portion of said bonus. Needless to say they finished ahead of schedule.

[Red Boots]

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

No. Even if they offered the cheapest, best health care in the whole, wide world I wouldn't want it. I don't take kindly to being FORCED into things by my Government.

[SonOfDarkSkies]

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!!!