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CORPORATE WELFARE. The 1990s may have succeeded in making welfare for the poor a dirty term but corporate welfare is still thriving. Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about its recent explosion under the Bush administration:
The trouble with government work, as opposed to the private sector is that there's a lack of efficiency. It's important to understand, however, that there's nothing intrinsically efficient about private sector work. No magical "it's the free market" dust comes and renders private enterprises effective. Rather, the idea is simply that an inefficiently run private enterprise (and there are many) would simply go out of business. An inefficiently run government office, by contrast, goes out of business when it loses political support and sees its budget grow as long as it maintains political support. Thus, you see public sector dollars flowing to whatever there's a strong political constituency for, whereas private sector dollars flow to wherever well-managed firms are meeting demand.Though it's good to keep in mind that "private sector dollars flow to wherever well-managed firms are meeting demand" only under certain circumstances and that markets can't deliver all kinds of goods and services so very efficiently, government contracts without fair and competitive bidding or any oversight amount to pretty much an open invitation to take some money out of the till, please. This lovely example from Texas shows us how it can be done.The Iraq reconstruction contracts look to be government-raiding magnified thousandfold. It will be fascinating (in a horrified way) to learn the final tally of all the money wasted there.
--J. Goodrich
