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Sunday, March 4, 2007Walter Reed HospitalI hate to keep talking about it...check that...I love to keep talking about it, but does anyone really think that the Uncle Sam knows how to run a successful hospital? Does anyone really think that the US Government would do as good a job providing health care as a private hospital would? I doubt it. In case you don't know what is happening...Walter Reed Hospital has been under heavy criticism for unsavory conditions. Conditions like rats and mold and other lovely things like that. Walter Reed is a hospital for injured soldiers and it is federally run. As you know, I am of the opinion that anything the government can do, private enterprise can do better. (on a side note...I don't actually believe that. For example, I don't think private enterprise should raise an army...but the basic premise is true I suppose) Doing activities like running a non-filthy hospital probably isn't that hard actually...it just depends on your incentives. My guess is that the incentives that are available for the Walter Reed staff aren't very good...this the decrepit conditions. Luckily our Congress is up in arms about this demanding that something be done. I'm sure people will be replace and then replaced by other government employees who have the same incentives. Not much will change in the long run. I'm jaded though...maybe I'm not the person to listen to on governmental issues. I just generally assume that any central government will mess it up, whatever it happens to be. The furor over the hospital will die down and Congress will move on to some other non-important topic to fight over. Like their involvement in Major League Baseball's steroid "controversy". That is a great example of Congress doing the right thing. Heck, even France doesn't get involved in the Tour de France's doping scandals...AND THAT'S FRANCE!!! eh...I just get cranky when I read about stuff like this. Our brave soldiers suffer because some politician wants to keep his job instead of finding out the best possible way to provide care for the solders. This is why I am jaded. Labels: Economics, Government, Privatization, Walter Reed Saturday, February 24, 2007USPSI have a question. I am hoping someone can answer me. I would appreciate comments/conversation on this topic if anyone is willing. My question is this: Should the United States Postal Service be privatized? I was reading a really interesting article put out by the Cato Institute. In it, a number of people were asked this very question. One of whom is the Postmaster General, Marvin Runyon. His comments were about what you would expect them to be: don't privatize the USPS, let us privatize ourselves. I would say that is pretty much the same thing. The USPS can't privatize themselves though...they have to ask permission to do pretty much everything. In other articles I have read there seems to be a question of what, if anything, privatization would do. Most economists say it would force the USPS to play by the same rules that regular companies do. For example, The USPS has turned a profit a number of times. When it does make a profit it does not have to pay any taxes that a regular profitable company has to pay. When it doesn't turn a profit, it evens the books by using federal tax money...your money. If the USPS were privatized I think it would force it to immediately improve efficiency (yes, I realize this is not a particularly original though..but it is true). Obviously it is not currently running efficiently because it rarely turns a profit. Privatization would eventually rectify that problem. Of course, a major problem with getting this done is to get it past the USPS federal employee union. All USPS employees are guaranteed their jobs, they certainly wouldn't want that to be in jeopardy. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens with the USPS. I think it needs to be done...to save my tax money and to be more efficient. Higher efficiency would free up more people to be more productive elsewhere. This is one of the early lessons of economics...scarcity. The scarce product here is labor. Another impact of privatization would be the new competition for first class mail. Currently the USPS has a legal (read: governmental) monopoly on first class mail. If the market would open up then the other carriers (UPS, FedEx, etc...) would want to get in there, driving prices down. These parcel carriers would also now have someplace to diffuse their costs and this would also drive down the prices for package shipment. None of this would happen right away probably, but the growing pains (read: higher prices) would be worth it in the long run. I doubt much will happen with this though...probably at best there will be some sort of semi-privatization, a la Fannie May. That would be better than nothing, but still would not be the ideal position that we as taxpayers deserve. I am interested in your thoughts on this. Labels: Economics, Privatization, USPS
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