> And people wonder why there is staunch support for less government involvement. At least when I get screwed over by a private company I can talk to someone...so long as it's not Google.
I don't bother wondering why people are ignorant anymore, some things just are. You get a vote simply by existing as a citizen and can put effort into changing government. Businesses can tell you to pound sand unless you're a shareholder or management. Government can be held accountable (caveats such as Venezuela and Somalia aside), businesses less so.
Boiling this down to biz vs gov is a false dichotomy.
There's some fundamental "usability" spectrum aligned with "optional-ness" vs "mandatory-ness". Equifax, Experian, Trans Union, etc have some of the worst customer service of all time. They make egregious errors and are not held accountable. My experiences with the DMV (another semi-mandatory service) pale in comparison with those 3 companies.
Of all the bad experiences I've had, it almost always comes down to "Do I have other options and how easy is it to opt-out?". The harder it is to opt-out, the worse my experience has been.
LOL. I remember when the city of Philadelphia flooded my house because they were doing some work on a neighboring structure. COP's response "We have a law that says the City of Philadelphia cannot be held accountable or sued for their actions". As Mel Brooks once put it, "its good to be the King".
The fundamental difference between the relationship between individuals and businesses and individuals and government is that one is voluntary, the other is not. Businesses need customers to survive, it is a very powerful motivator to providing good products and customer service if people are free to do business with someone else instead. Rapid changes in consumer habits, usually due to new options becoming available, have doomed many incumbents. Government agencies don't need you, you need them through force of the law.
Even if you are an employee, it's a voluntary relationship. If you feel you're not being treated fairly, you can try to complain, your leverage being that you are free to leave. The exception to this is monopoly situations which is why maintaining competitive environments is so important. We still haven't quite figured out the best way to do this. Regulations, in the broad sense, can help or hurt competition.
It's a romantic idea that we can change government through democracy but these agencies are quite removed from the democratic process. We elect representatives but they can't do anything unilaterally. Their priorities will not align with each individual's priorities at any given time. Even if it does align with your specific needs they need to build some kind of consensus with other representatives about what to change. It's a slow and imperfect process.
You are talking about monopolies or quasi monopolies. Business in competitive environment are incentivized to not screw their customers. AMD vs nVidia, Walmart vs Costco, Coca-cola vs Pepsi,... Even monopolies don't like to do that as to not attract negative attention, they just fix their price high and come up with a narrative to do so.
Whenever I have an issue with a private company, it usually getd resolved a lot faster. One time I called my ISP mad that I wasn't notified of their new cheaper and better plans, and they upgraded me, paid the difference and gave me a free month. The whole ordeal from start to finish lasted 20 minutes (including wait time on the phone). And ISPs are known assholes.
The problem with governments is that they are a monopoly by default and they can't really go bankrupt (and when they do, they find a way to survive).
And one of the ways we prevent monopolies, to protect the consumer, is by introducing government regulation of businesses. Look, we circled all the way back to the topic!
It's the difference between a monopoly by law rather than by economics.
If the local power utility is a private monopolist, there is still a limit to how abusive they can be before people will e.g. install solar panels, or buy a generator.
There is no limit to how abusive the local licensing bureaucracy can be because no matter what they do to you, no one can set up a competing licensing system that you can use instead. There is no equivalent to generating your own power.
And voting doesn't work when the affected people are a minority of the voters. The government could imprison everyone in the state of Nebraska and no one in Nebraska could do anything about it if the people in California don't care enough to vote in somebody else. They are in fact already incarcerating more than that many people without anybody stopping them.
It also doesn't work when the voters are misinformed. For example, the people of New York (and several other blue states) consistently pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal programs, yet their representatives continue to support high federal tax rates. Even if you support those programs, those constituents would be significantly better off if they were state rather than federal programs, and don't seem to notice this.
Of course everyone notices this. The willingness to pay taxes to benefit people beside yourself is the basic divide between left and right, so it’s not a coincidence that a more lefty state like NY elects representatives who support it.
Local taxes pay for roads and schools. Federal taxes pay for the F-35 and corn subsidies. The "people beside yourself" who "benefit" are the likes of Lockheed Martin and Monsanto.
> You get a vote simply by existing as a citizen and can put effort into changing government.
The whole structure of the modern civil service is to be as insulated from the democratic process as possible. To make them accountable to the democratic process would mean to politicize them.
With (most) private businesses you have an alternative. They may be able to tell you to pound sand, but if you can simply go to their competitor then they probably won't.
The bureaucracy always outlives any government or political movement. Yes, there are political appointments here and there but the rank and file is permanent.
The bureaucratic wing of the new class has other special rights and privileges as well. For starters, its members are virtually unfireable. “Death—rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs—is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations,” a study by USA Today found. In 2010, the 168,000 federal workers in Washington, D.C.—who are quite well compensated—had a job security rate of 99.74 percent.
I tend to agree that governments on the overall are held far less accountable for their actions than private companies, which will go bankrupt without patronage (without... ahem, government intervention). Government largesse extends beyond the policies of whatever administration is currently in office and therefore beyond your vote. We're talking about decades of built up cruft with no impetus for change. If you have a terrible time at the DMV, what do you do? Sell their shares? Stop shopping there? No, you just deal with it. Yes, it's one example, and I picked one that would intentionally elicit a response from almost anybody regardless of their political leanings, but that same example applies to many govt. organizations. They are inefficient and there is no correction mechanism.
I find getting the government on a call is possible but takes awhile at times. Good luck getting an email response from digitalocean. Good luck getting Amazon on the phone. Good luck getting Dang in the phone if you have an issue here Good luck getting anyone in any tech company to answer the phone.
> Good luck getting Dang in the phone if you have an issue here
I cannot speak for others, but I will go on the record that Dan has replied to every email I’ve ever sent over a decade and has helped me to become a more thoughtful and open minded contributor on HN through both his private emails and public comments. YMMV. Thanks Dan.
or… this is the result of cut-cut-cut politics. When we continue to cut funding, while asking our govt workers to do more, of course the quality of service is going to suffer. This isn't a problem in other countries.
Having seen the sausage made in a few different government bureaucracies, I'm fairly confident this is not the case. It all comes down to whether there is any incentive to improve customer experience.
I'm sure a lot of Germans on here would like to tell you about the hell that is the German bureaucracy. While it works, it can just be a nightmare of forms and millions of rules.
Footnote: Feliks Koneczny has an interesting analysis of why Germany is like this. He classifies Germany as belonging predominantly to what he calles Byzantine civilization (I'll leave it up to the interested to find out how he classifies civilizations), tracing it to the influence of Empress Theophanu. At the time he published his works, he took Bismarck's Germany as the quintessence of Byzantine Germany.
... or pretty much every large organization ever if you're somehow falling between the cracks, and your approval isn't critical to their survival. Paying em money isn't enough, unless it's enough money to move the needle.
People blaming government for this nastiness apparently have never dealt with any big businesses?
I mean, the government is exceptionally large and powerful, so that's even worse simply by scale; but on the other hand, they don't tend to cut corners quite as extremely as businesses do. In any case it's hardly a night and day difference. If anything, the kinds of checks present on the government should be present on all organizations beyond a certain size. Not that that's ever going to happen...
Yeah but unless it's utilities, or internet, I don't have to buy the product. My "vote" with my dollars can be immediate and have a direct affect on them. Saying I'm not gonna vote for someone isn't the same effect.
You don't have to buy their products the same way the government doesn't have to provide for your health care. While technically true, in practice it can easily mean the difference between a comfortable life and destitution.
I don't pay taxes the way I pay for a cell phone carrier. The taxes have to get paid no matter what -- I can't withhold payment or switch to a different carrier because I'm getting bad service. I could, as a privileged American, uproot my whole life and move elsewhere, but I'd still owe taxes for the time I had awful service, and depending on the circumstances might still end up owing at least some taxes until I renounced citizenship.
Like them or not, want them or not: taxes are not voluntary payments, and we can't apply the same logic to them.
