Does Government Do ANYTHING Right?

I just had a conversation with my sister about Jury Duty. I told her that the way citizens are treated by the officials is a disgrace. Our time is not valued, our persons are not respected. We are expected to be at the beck & call, and convenience of the Judge....no matter how long it takes, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable for us.

As a result, pretty much everyone hates to be called for jury duty. It's an unpleasant experience from beginning to end. Searched like criminals, herded like sheep into underground bunkers for indeterminate periods, paraded into courtrooms, questioned like first-graders by condescending judges and annoying lawyers, to determine our 'fitness'.

The FIX?
Make it a pleasant experience. What a fucking concept, eh?

Of course, this would never occur to government (meaning all the people who are rendered mindless, useless, and initiative-less, and mostly uncivil by civil service.)

So, Jury Duty continues to be avoided whenever possible, endured when that fails, and resented pretty much universally. Nice way to run a judicial system.

Then it occurred to me (duh!) that this is exactly the way government runs all its programs. They are badly conceived, stupidly managed, foolishly funded, inefficiently run, offensively implemented. No commercial venture run like government would ever succeed.

Then I tried to think of an exception. Surely, I thought, there must be something the government does well. But I came up blank.

I ticked through welfare, the tax code, the DMV, education, airport security, border control, maintaining infrastructure, finance/bugeting/debt management, import/export, managing Federal land, Social Security, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, mortgage & lending oversight!

We've got immense welfare fraud, a tax gestapo, illiterates graduating high school, hours of delay and hassle at airports, swarming illegals crossing the border, monumental deficit spending (without counting the War), inflated, late budgets, bonds & debts our grandchildren will have to pay, Chinese imports killing our pets, and poisoning our babies, a Social Security system that's a time bomb because of lies and prestidigitation, poor people multiplying like rabbits (without spouses), a flood of drugs in every corner of city and countryside, and foreclosures knocking homeowners down like dominoes.

I did think of libraries, and county parks that are nice, and realized it's because they are run locally. The closer to The People a program is, the better it is run. (The closer they are, the more we can scare them.)

Can ANYONE come up with a really well-run, financially sound, Government Program? What I can't figure out is, given decades of demonstrable evidence that government programs are the worst run, least efficient, most costly, most wasteful, and invariably unsuccessful, why we are still having this frigging debate?

The Gunslinger