I cannot remember the last time I had to go to the DMV. They have everything setup so I can just go online anytime of day and take care of business.

Last time I was at Starbuck's, I had to wait in a line for about 10 minutes. Then another 5 for my drink. The employees where apologizing, it was a rush.

Hmmm... I like the DMV here - in fact they are pretty much ideal. Except when I go to Starbuck's to flirt with the baristas.

Perhaps he better get another example.

You get what you pay for; alternatively, follow the money. The DMV employee is not paid to be friendly, the barista is.

Look at the motivations from the inside of almost any government agency. Take the Dept. of Education as an example: how can an employee build his or her own little empire? By finding problems to work on. If they were to actually eliminate any problems, they would eliminate their own jobs. Hence, we get disasters like NCLB.

Look at agricultural subsidies. If a citrus farmer gets federal funds when your orange crop freezes, guess what: there's no risk to planting oranges farther north. More problems with citrus crops give the agricultural bureaucracy continued reason to exist.

Of course, bureaucracy happens in private enterprise as well. The difference is that the load becomes so great that the company starts losing money. They are forced to clean house, trim down and start again.

At present, there is no outside factor to force government to eliminate needless bureaucracy. The result is inevitable.

Former Banker, his DMV example works for me just fine and I've had no major issues with my local DMV offices for years. I've still had to wait 30 minutes minimum to get anything done and thats with making sure I get there when they open in the morning (and going to certain branches known to be less busy/more efficient). I've also renewed online like you when I can.

Last time I was in starbucks I had a long wait too, for an overpriced but tasty hot chocolate. I don't shop there anymore unless desperate when traveling.

It boggles the mind at how people can buy into the meme that government can and will do it better than private business. Thats rarely the case.

Admit he could have gotten a better example than Starbucks, but he does have a point. Bladley, except for the 2 WW blips, that graph is a nearly straight line if you smooth the bumps off. Definitely scary. I wonder if some kind of mechanism where each program/department had a limited lifetime, and if a vote for renewal or extension was done would automatically mean a total rebuild would help. Not that I foresee our government doing anything like that...

Didn't you have some problem with a bank at some point? They don't give a crap about you. They have enough bucks with or without you. Same for your internet company. Same for a lot of companies out there. I don't trust them anymore than I trust government, mostly because I think big companies own the government.

I work at a charity. About 2 years ago (just before I was hired) we started hiring at about 90% of market value, instead of 50% like before.

Before we'd get people who "want to help", they were never as experienced or good, and because their motivation was based on emotion, it would wax and wane. Some of those people are still around.

Now that we hire people at almost market value, we get people who know what they are doing, want to help, and are motivated by "greed." Suffice it to say these people are about 100x better than the type of people we hired before, and we get more done and help more people.

There are other companies that will compete for your business. Short of renouncing your citizenship, you can't get another government.

I've never taken charity in my lifetime, and I don't intend to start, now. Besides, I've done a much better job than the government has (my net worth is positive, thank you), so why do I want incompetents trying to manage my life?

In fairness, the DMV gets a bad rap. It's one of the better government agencies, in NY anyway. I've waited longer in line at WalMart, to cite one example.

One of the advantages to living in a small, rural town is short lines at the DMV and Starbucks, and everybody knows you! On the other hand, you can never run to the DMV or Starbucks in your pajamas with unwashed hair because everybody knows you, unless you don't mind being teased.

DMV here in CT is a relatively smooth experience, but not particularly cheerful or quick. You're looking at a 2-3 hour wait to take a 16-question touchscreen test to get a motorcycle license. And the clerks always act like you're somehow inconveniencing them.

DMV is at best an indifferent experience. Just try disputing your property tax assessment, or getting a zoning variance for that corner of your house that goes three inches into the PUD setback. Then you'll see what government bureaucracy is all about.

Karen, companies certainly aren't immune from bureaucracy. But the cure for that is not government takeover -- it's to go find another business that does it better. Or perhaps start your own. As a commenter at Stossel's pointed out, if a good or service seems unreasonably expensive, the question to ask is not why is it so expensive, but why do people pay it. (And the answer is often that government regulation makes it expensive; e.g., day care.)

His example of the DMV vs. Starbucks was less about the wait time than it was about the treatment.

In Starbucks, they want me to come back and buy another coffee. They're always polite, they're trying as hard as they can to move the line along, and they make a product which suits the tastes of most of their customers.

At the DMV, they know I'll be back (because I can't go anywhere else) so they're not motivated to make my experience a good one (although some DMV employees do try). I took my nephew to the DMV recently. He waited over two hours to speak to an employee. From there, he had to take a test and wait another hour for processing. To be fair, we didn't have an appointment - because the soonest one he could make was over two months out. While waiting, I watched as several employees had a coffee klatch in front of tired and exasperated customers.

" ... companies certainly aren't immune from bureaucracy"

Indeed not. I find that unless people deliberately keep their businesses small and privately owned (which can create other problems), they will inevitably become constipated by bureaucracy. As someone who makes my living working for a lot of different companies, there is a HUGE difference between small companies with 30-40 employees and the giant corporate cube farms.

This doesn't bother me - when companies become big and stupid like Bank of America, they will begin to lose their customers, employees, and investors. New companies come in. Most companies never stay on the Fortune 500 for more than a few months. They experience life cycles just like people do. Only with government do you end up with something inefficient and expensive that never freaking dies.

DMV workers have always had a bad rap though I can't claim to have ever really been poorly treated by any. I interned at DSS and was amazed at how horrible the workers treated people. This was a government agency that people were coming to for help. Whatever anyone's thoughts on the welfare system, what I saw was truly disgusting. Its sad when a Starbucks employee has a higher standard for treating customers than a government employee who also happens to be getting paid by the taxpayers and receiving full benefits.

Any time you deal with a private company that is heavily regulated and subsidized, you'll pretty much get the same experience as from a government agency. Think banks, airlines, and cable TV franchises.

Starbucks VS DMV is a great comparison, but in a different way. Starbucks overpriced coffee has caused them to close at least half of their stores in the past couple of years. Why go to Starbucks when you can go to McDonald's and get their gourmet coffee for 1/3 the price and 1/4 the wait? The difference here is that Starbucks is in jeopardy of going out of business for not meeting their customers needs in an economic environment where a competitor has stepped up to own the market share. The DMV has no fear of ever going out of business no matter how poor of a product they produce or how badly they treat us. You loose your ability to vote with your feet in regards to government agencies.

Starbucks v. the DMV is a poor comparison in another way: Starbucks has a much more difficult set of tasks. Starbucks is in the food service business.

Food has a way of spoiling, getting contaminated, etc. Food must be brought from some far away place, often in a matter of hours to retain freshness, and food must move under tightly controlled conditions. That food must then served in a pleasant and tastefully appealling way within, literally, seconds of the customer's placing the order at the counter.

And Starbucks achieves that somewhere around, I suspect, 99% of the time for a few dollars of a customer money.

Making things more complicated, the menu is often changing, so new items are including or withdrawn from the mix, requiring training, etc. Also, employee turnover is high, so the ongoing training of new employees must be efficient and highly effective.

The DMV, by contrast, has the same employees for decades. The DMV offers a precious few limited services to customers. The services and plastic/paper items the DMV serves up almost never, ever change. And obviously, those items cannot spoil or go bad, etc.

But yet, the DMV takes longer, costs more, and provides lousier service than Starbucks. Why? Because no one has to give a shit at the DMV--you will be back no matter what.

I often say we should outsource things like the DMV to 3 or more private companies who bid on the work, who can then get franchises to set up kiosks and retail shops offering DMV services. Government's role is limited to auditing the vendors to ensure compliance with security procedures, etc. Let the vendors compete for customers on service and fees. Watch the fees drop and the wait disappear.

I'm not sure high-end coffee and the post office are a good comparison. People aren't going to buy coffee instead of mailing packages.

A better comparison would be the post office and UPS. In a local shopping center, there are both. UPS is a much more pleasant experience. There's never been more than one person ahead of me, and the staff is friendly and courteous. The post office has a surly staff, and usually the wait is about twenty minutes. However, it is much cheaper, so people seem to think it is worth the wait.

Now, there are some services that only the post office provides, but most people are sending packages, which they could do at UPS. However, they choose the post office instead.

If you eliminated the post office, many people wouldn't be able to afford sending their mail at all. Anywhere.

The government provides cheaper, crappier versions of the services, but that's all some people can afford. In your pure capitalist state, a lot of poor people would be screwed.

Nicole, I would have to dispute that in general a government agency is going to be able to offer less expensive anything than a private-sector entity, unless it is subsidized somehow. The reason the USPS can undercut UPS on parcel shipping is because the USPS parcel business is cross-subsidized by first-class mail, which they have a legal monopoly on.

The reason the USPS can undercut UPS on parcel shipping is because the USPS parcel business is cross-subsidized by first-class mail, which they have a legal monopoly on.

The USPS also receives taxpayer subsidies and revenue from third-class mail (flyers etc.).

If you eliminated the post office, many people wouldn't be able to afford sending their mail at all. Anywhere.

Not so. Someone would figure out a way to service those customers at a cost they could afford. Value customers may not have an option of overnight or priority delivery, but there is always empty space on a truck or bus somewhere.

Wal-Mart already uses their trucks in two-way shipping, filling them up on the return trip to make money and reduce wasted fuel. Sara Lee took advantage of this to reduce their own fleet shipping goods to Wal-Mart by having the empty Wal-Mart trucks pick up the merchandise at the docks for them and deliver it to Wal-Mart distribution centers.

"If you eliminated the post office, many people wouldn't be able to afford sending their mail at all. Anywhere."

"Many", "at all"? No offense, but you are just making that up. This is a situation where income levels and cost of paper delivery via service could be estimated. But we do not have that information available.

"The government provides cheaper, crappier versions of the services, but that's all some people can afford. In your pure capitalist state, a lot of poor people would be screwed."

The last sentence made me wince. Poor people are made better not by government services, per se, but by less costly food, less costly sheltering, less costly clothing, less costly medical and dental care, etc. In that, poor people are just like rich people. The same goods and services delivered more cheaply leads to greater material comforts for more people.

You apparently assume that government-provided services = less costly relative to alternative means of provision. Wrong. Really wrong, in fact, because you are mistaking stated "price" for "cost."

Do you think governments operating quasi-monopolies provide poor people the same quality level of food, shelter, clothing, etc. as private industry on a cheaper cost basis? (And note that "cost" includes actual costs, not stated prices subsidized or externalities like waiting lists left out.)

I don't, and in fact, during the 20th centure, there were some very, very large experiments run, which essentially demonstrated my view is likely more correct. (Hayek and his ilk pretty much nailed this whole thing decades ago. The world is just now catching up.)

So, in light of that, why is mail delivery any different from food, shelter, etc.? It isn't. I suspect that our mail *looks* cheaper as a stated price because of subsidies and cost-hiding practices. But that stated stamp price is likely just the product of a web of resource-shifting subsidies and externalities keeping the nominal price low, while the actual cost is higher than need be. So the poor are paying a low price for a stamp, while the larger cost of mail delivery is imposed on society at large in hidden ways.

But as the society pays that hidden mail cost, everyone is made more poor, including the poor. We just don't see it as a direct expense, so we marvel at the cheap stamps, ignoring (while paying) the hidden but very real costs not included in the price.

This is then called "fairness" by some.

But that is not fairness, it is simply hiding the true cost in favor of a deceptive "price".

A price based on actual cost is a wonderful means of signalling to consumers--including the poor--what are the costs involved in a service or good, and allows the consumers to decide whether to buy.

And contrary to what you seem to believe, when prices increase, for food or mail, it is not the case that poor people will simply stop some activity like eating or communicating via written means. Rather, they opt for substitute goods and services which largely satisfy their needs, and perhaps reduce at the margin their consumption of the now-pricier food or mailing service, where their satisfaction was subject to decreasing marginal utility anyway. (Put another way, they decide to mail 8 letters this year rather than 10--skipping Aunt Sally on the x-mas card list-and send 2 more emails instead. They feel okay about that, in most cases.)

This is what we want to happen, whether you are discussing energy, medical care or mail service. Price giving consumers feedback on costs, so consumers can make efficient decisions about allocating their consumption among the options.

So, if you really want to help the poor, you should let the price find its market-clearing rate without any hidden subsidies or cost shifting. And *then* provide the poor a direct income transfer to let them buy what they want. Much more efficient, which in turn allows society to be wealthier via higher productivity and efficient resource allocation. And the (relatively) poor tend to benefit as their societies gain in wealth.

Some like to argue that last point, but I think the past two centuries, which have seen our society's "poor" come to live better than the wealthiest kings of old, makes a mockery of such views. Some views are impervious to mockery, though.

OFFTOPIC-–

(Well, maybe it's not offtopic. "Saving the planet" is definitely a fairy tell enjoyed by many adults.)
_____________

When Carlin died, I said some thoughtfully nasty things about him. (The injunction against criticizing the dead is too often observed.)

But as Earth "Day" has swollen to a tumescent "Week", a friend (one who actually has some religious faith!) tweeted this brilliant clip.

The old boy may not have had a perfect sense of proportion, but there was SOME humility in his heart....

Everybody has tales, good and bad, about government and business. For every salesman with a happy smile on his face who sells a shoddy or dangerous product, there's a grumpy government worker who protects a helpless citizen. And for every bribe taking public official, there's a hard-working entrepreneur who delivers excellent quality services to her grateful customers.

Having a discussion with this analogy isn't meaningful. Plus the words were "fair" and "reliable." Fairness at Starbucks? Um, not waiting on a customer who came later than others? Reliability? Getting your coffee order right? Oooo, challenging!

Oftentimes a government worker is strangled by rules not of his creation that don't make a lot of sense. Over time and amendment, something simple can become so complex, nobody's quite sure what to do. But those complexities arose out of debates and decisions (made into law) to be fair and reliable. Take for example the evolution of our building codes and regulations and what happens in countries who don't have proper codes such as Haiti.

Yes, there are government reps and appointees whose main motivation is greed for money and power, but it's a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the public sector - a sector that includes school teachers, firemen, sanitation workers, the Coast Guard and lots of others who do things for our benefit that we'd be sorely at a loss without. And there are plenty of CEOs who live lives of excess and riches off the sweat, unfair pay and abuse of their employees. Enron anyone? Where was the fairness and reliability vis à vis employee pensions? Lack of fairness and unreliability exist across the spectrum of human endeavors.

We can "vote" every time we patronize a particular business or shun another one. Business has to be more responsive to its "constituents" because it means being successful or closing the doors.

Due to the democratic process we say we believe in, we can't fire elected representatives on a two-week notice. And we don't have the option to participate in government-run activities or not without consequences. If you don't have a driver's license and you get caught, you will probably be fined.

I'm sure many people would like to "throw the bums" out of Washington on a moment's notice, or decide for themselves if they want to pay taxes or build and sell a house without an inspector's approval. That's called anarchy and it's not a good place to live because know what citizens? We're as likely to be unfair and unreliable and those whom we criticize.

It's like so many things in life. There are no easy answers, no simple solutions. But oh Lord, do we pretend otherwise.

> For every salesman with a happy smile on
> his face who sells a shoddy or dangerous
> product, there's a grumpy government
> worker who protects a helpless citizen.

WHHHHAAAAAATTT?!?!?!?

Who told you this?

Jesus Fuck.

Government is more predictable and valued than Business. Businesses sometimes make promises they don't keep, surprising and angering their paying customers.

Government makes promises that it almost never keeps. This doesn't surprise anyone, who are still happy for whatever free help they receive.

"For every salesman with a happy smile on his face who sells a shoddy or dangerous product, there's a grumpy government worker who protects a helpless citizen."

A "helpless citizen?" The liberal mindset on display - all citizens are pitiful wretches, redeemed only by the benevolent mercy of our glorious leaders.

Tell you what: Maintain an army, allow me to buy a gun and some ammo and I'll take care of the rest. Helpless my ass.

"build and sell a house without an inspector's approval" I went through this and I call bullshit, point blank. For every useful part of any code there are pages of useless shit and exception to useless shit that make said shit more useless. Some things that are clearly fire hazards are AOK and some completely innocuous shit forbidden. Then there is lead testing. And the crowning achievement of all this is "AS IS" sales. Almost all of the code can be ignored IF you make it an "AS IS" from lead and asbestos, to bad wiring. The government hasn't actually made it harder to screw the average person just made the process harder to understand, and thus easier on the crook.

I'll grant you that many federal employees start out with the ideal of helping other. It all fall apart really fast from all the nut sucking and politicking.

"Maintain an army, allow me to buy a gun and some ammo and I'll take care of the rest." What no Marines, Seals or pilots? :)

Yet one more example of bureaucratic stupidity or inefficiency are the gun laws. Someone who has limited resources can not buy a gun in a gun controlled state including black powder and muzzle loaders. However if you have the means and or the connections you can get one legally in almost all of them. The legal mis use of inheritance laws is one example. Yes that includes machine-guns, grenade launchers, flame throwers and vehicle mounted. The average person that these laws were supposed to protect are screwed, no gun for you. The bad guys can get these and the well off can get them.

Judges, prosecutors, and police are all government workers who do a decent job of protecting citizens whether helpless or not.

"Yes, there are government reps and appointees whose main motivation is greed for money and power, but it's a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the public sector - a sector that includes school teachers, firemen, sanitation workers, the Coast Guard and lots of others who do things for our benefit that we'd be sorely at a loss without. And there are plenty of CEOs who live lives of excess and riches off the sweat, unfair pay and abuse of their employees. Enron anyone? "

How many Enrons have there been in the last 20 years? Out of the hundreds of thousands of incorporated businesses in the U.S.? I count, well, two: Enron itself, and Global Crossing, which you will never hear mentioned in the media because they were smart enough to donate a ton of money to Democrats (unlike Enron), and so their execs were never prosecuted or driven to suicide. That's without even getting into the very convenient logical fallacy expressed: that if one single person in the private sector is a bad actor, then that excuses everything bad that government has ever done. This is a common cheap rhetorical trick that the Left uses: since leftists will tell you proudly that they do not believe in morals, they are therefore morally superior to conservatives if one single conservative fails to live up to their morals. Therefore, the amoral people are morally superior. Yeah, right.

And anyway, it all misses the root problem. Government cannot efficiently do things because the motivations are all wrong. It doesn't matter how good-hearted the individual government employees are. When you're in a situation where good work is not rewarded and bad work is not punished, you're going to get resentful and not work as hard. It's basic human nature. Without a profit motive, government bureaucracies have no motivation to improve, especially if it's a bureaucracy that provides a legally required or widely needed service, such as drivers' licenses. Why bother? People have to do business with you anyway. It's not like they have a choice. The DMV employees don't stand for election; they aren't going to get voted out. The people who do face the possibility of getting voted out are so far removed organizationally from the DMV that it isn't ever going to be a concern for them one way or the other. Besides, those people get special treatment when they need their licenses renewed -- the DMV knows which side its bread is buttered on -- and so they fail to see that a problem exists.

"Where was the fairness and reliability vis à vis employee pensions?"

I guess you've been following what's happened with public-sector pensions, huh?

Spartee said "I often say we should outsource things like the DMV to 3 or more private companies who bid on the work, who can then get franchises to set up kiosks and retail shops offering DMV services. Government's role is limited to auditing the vendors to ensure compliance with security procedures, etc. Let the vendors compete for customers on service and fees. Watch the fees drop and the wait disappear."

No, Spartee, you didn't take it far enough. The government's role should be limited to hiring an auditing firm.

It seems that several people on this blog suffer from premature interjection. I said that unfairness and unreliability exist on both sides of government and business. I never said one excuses the other.

If I were a fire fighter and had to rescue some of your sorry asses from a burning building, I sure as hell would be grumpy about it. How about next time your house is on fire you go piss on it, since helpless isn't part of your persona.

If you think unfairness exists in your local building dept, get your butt to a meeting where the codes are discussed and decided. Too busy? Don't give a damn? STFU

Just because it doesn't hit the news, doesn't mean employees aren't regularly screwed over by corporate mergers, downsizing and "creative accounting." If you haven't lost your job and your accrued benefits, as I did three times in five years in the late 90s, I guess it's not worth thinking about.

And speaking of Starbucks, at least 7,000 workers lost their jobs due to reckless over expansion, I imagine most of them were friendly baristas, not the upper management suits who created the debacle.

And privatization? This is from 2 days ago in the Columbus, IN: Republic. "Top officials with the state Department of Health and Human Services (Nebraska) tried to assure the public Thursday at a news conference that reform is still on track.

In less than a month, two contractors that the state hired to provide essential services to more than a third of the 6,340 state wards have been lost — one because it went broke, the other because it decided the contract didn't pay enough. That leaves three contractors, and they are expected to pick up the extra work later this summer."

Good luck on that front.

> I said that unfairness and unreliability exist
> on both sides of government and business.

No. You said—

> For every salesman with a happy smile on
> his face who sells a shoddy or dangerous
> product, there's a grumpy government
> worker who protects a helpless citizen.

That's just daydream cosmology. If you think anyone, ANYONE in government got into it without pursuit of their own best interests as an overwhelming motivation, than you're deeply deluded about human nature, let alone civic affairs.

Government isn't your Dad. It doesn't love you very very much, like your Mom does. It isn't a lofty enterprise composed by divine inspiration so that anyone –even the "helpless citizens"– can be soothed and ennobled. In America, government is supposed to be a method for consenting people to get common needs answered. There may be a few people in government who will occasionally not be too cruel to some poor sap out there... But let's not pretend they're doing holy work. We're paying those people, and we're paying for their retirement and their health care and for a lot of other treats that the rest of us don't enjoy. We are the author of any good that they do... It comes out of our pockets, not their dear hearts.

The time passes fast when you are retired, so I can't tell you when it happened. But, in the state we lived in before retirement, some years ago (?) the DMV people were so unbelievably rude that the people all over the state started community meetings to raise Cain about it. They raised enough of a stink that the state leaders actually had to do something about it. DMV workers had to attend "charm schools", so to speak. And, there was an efficient complaint system. Within a year, it got better.

Since I've been chained in a cellar all my adult life, educate and inform me. You're oppressed and in slavery. Your every waking moment sucks because of government tentacles. You can't afford a decent life and apparently suffer daily nervous breakdowns due to evil government workers whose only purpose in life is to drain you dry and give you nothing in return. It's a wonder any of you even bother getting up in the morning, you're so close to the brink of suicide.

This is going to be stretch because so far, i'm not convinced any of you knuckle draggers is capable of intelligent debate, and you all seem to get your rhetoric from licking Glenn Beck's blackboard. plus this isn't sound bite stuff. You'd actually have to come up with specifics.

Here's an essay by a politics professor - I'm not afraid of the truth, tell me exactly how these government agencies have negatively impacted YOUR life. How the goons from these agencies harass you and how YOUR life would be improved by eliminating the so-called "benefits" of these agencies.

Bring it on if you've got anything to say. If it's only the truth that will set me free (and all the other idiots like me) ... show me the way. I mean this professor is out there, duping the masses and keeping us feeding the beast you so desperately want to starve, but thus far haven't done a damn thing to change.

And I wouldn't have discovered his website, never knew he existed until this morning, but I'm curious about the world and don't take anything for granted. If my perspective on Medved's Myth generates such vituperative bile, I want to know why. And in trying to discover some truth, found this essay. So it's your turn, tell me EXACTLY how he lies.

http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=1&p=1

Why don't you get into Amy? You've got a call out for intelligent questions. Of course, this isn't a one liner you can toss off with a witty retort. But maybe that's all you've got. Simple answers for simple questions. Am I baiting you? Damn straight. I'm so sick of conservative bitching, taking what we have granted, and reducing everything down to bullshit. I mean really, Amy. Really? You think there's an actual person or committee in Washington who woke up and decided to harass a six-year-old? You can't possibly concede that in trying to keep Americans alive when they fly in an era of terrorism, that creating a safeguard can't possibly be perfect? I believe I addressed that concept in my original post. But you and your readers only read the first line. Buncha fucking bullshit.

People implement a government to ensure the smooth workings of a society. To pretend the government is a benevolent guardian is to live voluntarily in an infantile fantasy.

That pretension is what brought Hitler, Lenin, Chavez, and other "benevolent" dictators to power.

The American Revolution was mostly about the governed taking charge of the government. No one here is arguing that a government responsible to the governed doesn't adequately fulfill the role of watchdog and service provider - when properly restricted.

And the American Revolution has influenced revolutions through out the world, from the French Revolution, to the Prague Spring, to Tiananmen Square, to the Velvet Revolution.

While your professor makes some good points, he also makes several leaps of logic that don't hold up. He assumes from the beginning that a big government and all it does can only be benevolent and carry no long-term costs to society.

You put a couple of letters in your mailbox. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, a government employee will come to your house, pick up the letters, and have them delivered in a few days to someone on the other side of the country. A pretty good deal.

The "price of a cup of coffee" is only part of the actual cost of delivery (and where in the hell is he getting $40-cent coffee). The flood of third class mail in your mailbox is another part of the price you pay for cheap mail. The taxpayer-funded subsidies spent on the USPS are another part of the cost, the part you don't see.

And the government forbids private companies from delivering first class mail - so we don't really know if FedEx or UPS couldn't do it even cheaper.

One of the reasons you can afford this [expensive daycare] program is the $3,000 child care tax credit you get from the federal government every year.

So, I can afford better day-care because the government gives me back some of the money it takes from me. Wow. Damned nice of the government to give me my own money back.

But only for a specific use. Wait, I don't have children, so I don't get that money back. If only the government gave the rest of my money back to me, think what I could afford.

...you will be eligible for state-mandated unemployment insurance should [you get laid off]. This is just another way that government helps you to cope with the economic risks and uncertainties of a modern economy.

And creates a permanent underclass dependent upon the government. Limited unemployment is a social safety net. Unlimited (or constantly extended) unemployment results in taking from the productive to give to the unproductive. And there is a long-term cost to that.

And, if the government had left me more of my own money, I could have put it in an emergency fund (or bury it in the yard) to help me handle economic risks and uncertainties.

Damned formatting. The last two paragraph shouldn't be indented.

Excerpt from Jonah Goldberg's "Capitalism vs. Capitalists" in National Review:

I bring all of this up because many in Washington seem convinced that the solution to the problem with capitalists is always less capitalism. To be sure, a free-market society is in some sense a government program. The government must prosecute criminality, enforce contracts, and demand that the rules be observed. Few lovers of free markets are so laissez-faire as to want to strip the government of its role as referee.

But few should want the ref to suit up and play the game.

Washington’s solution to Wall Street’s problems is to get Washington deeply, deeply involved in Wall Street. So involved that the savvier capitalists will recognize — once again — that the safest bets are not to be found in the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace, but in gaming the system run from Washington. The “reform” coming down the pike will put bureaucrats in charge of investors. If bureaucrats were better than investors, they wouldn’t be bureaucrats. The government will decide which firms are worthy — “systemically important” — and which are not. Those that are will use their official “importance” to game the system. Instead of eradicating “too big to fail,” we will systematize it.

> Buncha fucking bullshit.

Don't pout.

More rhetoric, no personal experience. Thanks for at least reading the piece Conan. Peace out, y'all.