I want to sit back and drink cocoa and bake cookies. I really just want to enjoy the holidays and not think of anything else. That just can’t happen, although the last few days I’ve tried. Still, I had to switch over to CNN every now and then just for a fix. It would be so wonderful to keep my head buried in the sand and not think about the terrorist attacks in India and just trust that Obama is going to make all the right appointments to make everything better.
But, I can’t do it any more. I have to get back to reality. The thing that snap me back this morning wasn’t any of the horrible things I could pick up. It was a little report about contracting out of government. Beginning in ‘81 with Reagan, through Clinton and with more aggression than ever under W., the federal government has been outsourcing. Under the guise of “government is inefficient” and “government is the problem”, more and more things are not being handled by the government at all. Many of the contracts are no bid. We are not just talking about hiring someone to trim the hedges, as we see in Iraq as the most prominent example: there are more contractors in Iraq than soldiers.
What struck me as I listened to the report and the clips of Reagan and Bush declaring government to be the problem was just how ludicrous it seemed. They have been dismantling government for 28 years now. At what point does it cease to be the problem? If it is a problem, why is it bigger than ever? Maybe instead of drowning it in the bathtub like Grover suggested, they decided to feed it until it exploded. I kept thinking of my friend telling all the homilies about government being the problem and how fearful she was of the new administration. But, it just doesn’t add up for me. If government was the problem, so we outsourced it piece by piece for 28 years to business and now we are it is in a total state of fubar – is it government or business that is the problem? Which is worse? The stereotype that government is inefficient and bound by mounds of red tape and people too lazy to work or what we are seeing now. Business (Finance) has been willing to take any gamble to make any short term gain to pay huge salaries and bonuses to those at the very top. They built a house of cards on castles made of sand, using methods that no one understood. Anything to make the bottom line look good at that moment. Anything and everything to make sure that the stock price went up.
Government bureaucracy can be a horrible mess, but it seems it has at least the potential to look a little further in the future than business and consider broader goals than a handful of CEO’s. In a way, I can’t believe I’m even saying this. In the 80’s I really bought into the idea that government was broken. It was. It is. But, corporatizing it could make it oh so much worse.
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