The stupid, it burns!

[nancylebov]

Town - Crap! We accidentally set a coal seam on fire.
Some guy with backhoe - Hey, give me less than $200, problem will be fixed.
Town - Well, we need to do all the paperwork, give us a bit.
Guy, some time later - Sorry town, it's too big for me to fix.
Mine owner - I'll fix it for free, if you let me keep any unburned coal I dig up.
Town - Sorry, we've already taken bids to fix it, no can do.
Town - Crap, while we were taking bids, it got too big for anybody local! State? Fix this!

More.....

In case you didn't follow the link in bladespark's riff:

Over the years, various state and federal funded attempts to dig the Centralia fire out proved to be unsuccessful, for a variety of reasons. One is that the projects were designed around the amount of money willing to be spent, not the amount needed to properly do the job.

The article has a good bit about mine fires and how to put them out as well as being an account of remarkably expensive cluenlessness at multiple government levels.

Title snagged from a comment by sparkindarkness.

Comments

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Yes, but they've ensured that no procurement official is receiving bribes and no bidder is receiving preferential treatment, and isn't that the important thing?

[Yes, that's sarcasm. I figure the stuff I'm building for the gov't has over 50% of it's cost going to assorted ass-covering procedures. But if your priority is a "pure" process then everything else winds up low priority.]

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

My problem is, as Krugman points out in today's column, that this is dysfunctional incompetent government.

There are millions of examples of competent government management of emergency stuff every day. But if we are convinced that government is only capable of incompetent response, than we refuse to pay for it and get no response at all.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

The problem is that government, by definition, needs these kind of rules, because without them the treasury will soon be emptied. It's all very well to say that they should have given $200 to the guy with the back-hoe to fix the problem - and a private businessman would probably have recognised that this was the sensible thing to do and the problem would have been solved. But if the city was allowed to do that, pretty soon everybody's brother-in-law with a backhoe would be getting $200 every other week to "solve" non-existent problems. The underlying issue is that government isn't allowed to be arbitrary, while an individual is. So I can give $200 to someone if I think it's worth doing, and then refuse to give $200 to the next 10 applicants because I don't think it's worth paying them, without having to justify it to anyone but myself; if a town clerk acted like that the other 10 people would justly demand to know why. (Much the same applies to large businesses, where the money is being spent by salaried managers, not by the owners; but even there the owners can fire the managers if they suspect something wrong. When you get to megacorporations you do have the same problem, as Adam Smith learned during his stint at the East India Company.)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

All true--if the purpose of government is to dispense largess to the deserving or needy. If voters treat it as a provider of needed services then the same mechanisms can work as in a business. The guy at top is fired if too many bad decisions get made, and appropriate rules are promulgated. Megacorps still delegate more responsibility than the gov't does.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

No, that is precisely the problem - in government the guy handing out the money is safe. The voters don't care about the bottom line because 1) voting is not linked to taxpaying - the majority of voters pay a small percentage of the government's revenue, or none at all; 2) any government surplus (hah!) doesn't get distributed to the voters as a dividend; 3) any loss won't have to be made up by most voters, they'll just stick it to a few wealthy people. Also, the voters don't get to say anything until the next election, by which time other matters will have intervened.

And a significant percentage of voters themselves depend on government for their income, so they want to see government enlarged by any and all means, and the campaigns appeal to them for their votes by promising to spend more. The class interest of the public service is simply to increase spending, it doesn't matter for what. So they'll be very sympathetic to some guy who claims that there's an urgent problem that must be fixed right now by paying him $200.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

PS I forgot to add that most public servants can't be fired, so long as they haven't broken any formal rules. So long as there isn't a rule that says you can't hand out money without studying the problem and taking bids, they can't be fired for doing so, no matter how careless they are with the public purse. Because "careless" is inherently a judgment call. At least at the East India Company people could be fired, even if it wasn't likely to happen to any individual.