Monday, October 22, 2007

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

3 comments:

  1. I am extremely interested to know how much of every dollar that I am taxed for social programs, welfare in particular, actually winds up in the recipients pocket. After paying the salaries of the case worker, lower and upper level management, the rent on the office, utilities etc. ad infinitum, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the cost of administering these programs is at least 90% of every dollar taxed. If anybody has this information please share it.
    As far as the court system, it would not be possible for me to be tried by a jury of my peers simply because my peers are all smart enough or busy enough to avoid jury duty. This is stated not with arrogance but with first hand knowledge of how easy it is to get excused from having to sit on a jury. That said, I'd still prefer to take my chances in an American court room than anywhere else.

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  2. Trackbacked by The Thunder Run - Web Reconnaissance for 10/23/2007
    A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

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  3. In Oklahoma we used to have an efficient way of killing death row inmates. Texas did too. Then the lawyers and liberal cry babies got the courts involved in an argument about how "cruel" being killed can be before it falls into "cruel and unusual" punishment. Shouldn't punishment be a little cruel to be called punishment?

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