Help me develop this rebuttal: Talking point - Efficiency.

[Union Thug]

Everytime i hear a debate between a liberal and a conservative involving the role of government, the conservative always throws out the word "efficient" to blast the <insert your government sponsored program here> and praise the "free market."

Now, the specific issues have their own specific arguments that either refute or support either side's position. What I haven't heard, however is a more general assessment of this position...such as this:

In most cases, the questions we face cannot be about what is considered more efficient, because what is more 'efficient' is NOT necessarily what is right. A democracy is less efficient than a dictatorship, but we choose (ostensibly) to remain a democratic nation because we recognize that rule by the people is right.

As liberals, we recognize that the fair and just treatment of humanity may not always be the most 'efficient' way of looking at the world, but we do recognize that it is right. I'll choose what is right over what is efficient any day.

Anybody else given this much thought, or can point me to some good writing on this specific question?

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. "Efficiency" vs "FreeMarket"

I think that one can turn this aurgument on its head by challenging the concept of "free market". What is exactly meant by the term? Is the market truly free in that every business has a chance to bid on providing the goods/or services? Or has privatization of government services actually caused a consolidation of businesses, such as what has happened with Haliburton?

[jdj]

14. an assertion like that demands documentation

efficiency is about numbers,so they should be able to whip the numbers out and talk about them. If they don't have the numbers on hand they are just wanking. The proper response to efficiency claims should always be "show me."

[Liberal Veteran]

2. Ask them what is so efficient about our health care system..

...where bureaucrats and accountants decide which doctors you can see and then require doctors and a team of medical transcriptionists to file forms to get paid and you need approval from a HMO to see a specialist or to get a necessary surgery.

How would government run health care be any worse that the levels of bureaucracy you have to go through to get health care now and yet still leaves tens of millions of people without access to basic health care and using emergency medical services for minor care?

[Lefty48197]

3. What kind of "efficiency" do they have in mind for the post office?

Having a private mail carrier pick up a letter at your home and delivering it to any other home in the country? At what cost? About $1.50 per letter? That's not my idea of efficiency.

[Union Thug]

15. all of you are offering great points...

about the relative efficiency of specific government services. And these are excellent bits.

However, what if we just stop talking about a specific issue and talk in more general terms about efficiency, the economy and morality and ethics? This is the direction I really want to go in.

Any thoughts?

[TahitiNut]

4. The notion of 'efficiency' is producer-centric ...

... and, like all increasingly myopic business-centric viewpoints, ignores externalizations. "Externalizations" are the costs and burdens shifted 'outside' the business/organization. When, for example, we evaluate the 'efficiency' of an Emergency Room, we address the work performed (patients seen and treated) over a period of time by a certain level of resource offered. Unfortunately, this rarely addresses the amount of time those patients wait to be seen, their creature-comforts, the political/emotional care given to family/friends, or a plethora of other external impacts.

I'd like to see some level of compensation provided, by law, to customers/clients/consumers who are caused to bear the workload or other burden of such a system. We're getting there. In California, any home service provider is required, by law, to make an appointment within a 4-hour window. They're subject to a fine if they fail to make the appointment on time. (It's not easy to enforce, but the reliability of such appointments increased dramatically after this law was passed.)

[jdj]

16. that makes me think about Walmart

keeping wages and theft/loss and other overhead low yet forcing workers to rely on social services like county health clinics which drives up county and city taxes, and forcing small business owners to close their doors which forces them on to the dole forcing up state and federal taxes. Walmart sure is a microcosm of trickle down economics.

[Dark]

5. Here's a link about the 'efficiency' of our free-market healthcare:

http://www.hms.harvard.edu/news/releases/0820woolhimmel.html

A Special Article published in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine finds that health care bureaucracy cost Americans $294.3 billion in 1999. The $1,059 per capita spent on health care administration was more than three times the $307 per capita in paperwork costs under Canada's national health insurance system. Cutting U.S. health bureaucracy costs to the Canadian level would have saved $209 billion in 1999

The study was carried out by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Canada's quasi-official health statistics agency. The authors analyzed the administrative costs of health insurers, employers' health benefit programs, hospitals, nursing homes, home care agencies, physicians and other practitioners in the U.S. and Canada. They used data from regulatory agencies and surveys of doctors, and analyzed Census data and detailed cost reports filed by tens of thousands of health institutions in both nations.

Overhead in Canada's provincial insurance plans, which provide most coverage, averaged 1.3% vs. 11.7% for private insurers in the U.S. and 3.6% for U.S. Medicare. Bureaucratic costs were also far higher for U.S. doctors and hospitals than for their Canadian counterparts.

You like? Give that to a freeper and ask them how their 'free market' increases efficiency.

[Union Thug]

6. Thx for the link! /eom

[Dark]

7. Your very welcome!

Please tell me what garbage he/she uses to respond to this. I'd be interested to see what he/she has to say.

Hopefully more than "It's just a bunch of liberal whackos."

[Union Thug]

13. Well, it's actually not a debate i am personally involved in..

just something that keeps popping up. I heard some joe peschi wannabe conservative blowhard say this on the talk show host debate sponsored by the heritage foundation. It always rubs me the wrong way when I hear it, but I've never thought of that concept, in general terms (apart from the particular issue they try to attach it to).

[aTm_exrugger]

8. This is my take.

First I ask them how efficient a big corporation is. If they say very, call bullshit. Working for a large corporation, you see the excesses and inefficiencies. They are willing to suffer a little bit of lost efficiencies to keep revenue up, and to keep employees honest. i.e. getting expenses approved, managers on top of managers.

But my reasoning is this. Government is like a conglomerate. They are responsible for a service, and many of these services are not one people can be without. So in order to protect the integrity of these services, they have to have levels of government with redundancy and protection. Unfortunately this protection also hurts us if it becomes too restrictive. This is the balancing act. Think of what would happen if government went the way of the airlines, or phone companies.

[Union Thug]

11. having worked for three very large corporations,

You are dead on. Efficiency? Corporations? Oh Please. There's a certain little project to which I am currently assigned that would turn the efficiency preachers upside down..

[canuckforpeace]

9. "The Efficient Society" by Joseph Heath

A good book that contrasts the differences between the U.S. & Canada that I read a few years back. Heres some quotes from the book.

"The Efficient Society: Why Canada is as Close to Utopia as it Gets" by Joseph Heath
Copyright 2001

Pg. xiv “ The old joke about Canadians being merely unarmed Americans with health insurance has a lot of truth to it. Our economy resembles the economy of the United States more than that of any other country. The central difference is that the majority of Canadians have no ideological opposition to government. We do not love the state, but neither do we fear it. Thus we get all the benefits of a loosely regulated economy while also enjoying the massive improvements in social welfare that can be organized and delivered only by government. This has proven to be a winning formula.”


Pg. 58 “American civilization is like a great social experiment, designed to see just how much inefficiency people will be prepared to tolerate in the name of liberty.”

Pg. 93 “Conan the Barbarian summed up the competitive mindset quite nicely when he described the ‘good things’ in life as being ‘to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women’ – a sentiment that probably,despite protestations to the contrary, still resonates with a lot of men”

Pg 166 “HMOs have been so succesful that they now occupy a dominant position in the market for health care in the United States. Approximately forty-five million Americans are uninsured. Of the remainder, about half are enrolled in some type HMO. Most others receive some sort of managed care plan. Less than 10 per cent of Americans still have classic fee-for-service health insurance (down from more than 70 per cent in the late ‘80’s).”


Pg 189 “The United States spends close to 15 per cent of its GDP on health care. No other country in the world , Canada included, spends more than 10 per cent.”


Pg 200 “Eventually, we will have to put emphasis on other values, like equality, because efficiency alone fails to generate a stable social order.”

Pg 210 “Thus the problem with social inequality is that it generates a class of people who stand to benefit from the production of social bads. Environmental degradation, production of nuisance goods (such as cigarettes), erosion of health and safety standards, lengthening of the work day – all these practices generate welfare losses for society as whole, but increased profitability for particular firms.”

[Union Thug]

10. straight to the point. thx for this!

[BiggJawn]

12. Look at the City of Indianapolis

Back in the 90's High Priest of Privatization Steve Goldsmith was gonna put all city services except for police in private hands, in order to save money.

First, he started with Fleet Services. Fleet got lean and mean in a big hurry, and beat back all attempts to privatize. They did extensive internal audits and corrected things like have a supervisor for every 3 hourly employess, went to competitive bidding for parts uppliers, etc.

Next in his sights was the City IT department.This got handed to an outfit called SCT, they brought in some dot-commer flunkies, Told the city they could "fix" the "Y2K Problem" for about 200 kilobucks. By the time 12-30-99 came, they had "Please sir, may we have some more?" themselves before the council to the tune of about 4 megabux. and we all know how big a problem Y2K was, right?

Then the new Jail Annex was handed to CCA.

Then he tried to privatize my department. After several RFP's that were not answered, he finally bribed a coupla outfits into submitting proposals. the cheapest was 3X what our budget was, included the City buying 3 megabuck's worth of new equipment (I had just finished upgrading the plant with new equipment) and they wanted to sell time on the city access cable channel.

The local PBS affil said in their letter of declination "We don't see how they do what they do for so cheap!"

Privatization is a false religion. Anyone who says otherwise has a scam in his mind that he thinks will make him a buttload of money off the taxpayers for little work.

[sandnsea]

17. Outsourced tech support is sooo efficient

It's just not true, the private sector is not more efficient than government. Another example, the war in Iraq, outsourced to Halliburton et al. NOT efficient.

It used to be more true because we used to have US corporations that actually believed in *gasp* customer service and highly trained reps with good wages and benefits so they stayed with the company, had loyalty, and actually cared. That's long gone. So now we have inefficiency all around as far as I'm concerned.

Just because they say it's so doesn't make it so. First mistake of Dems is to think there's something true about what Reps are saying and arguing with their premise. If you think about it, they're usually just flat out wrong.

[m berst]

18. trading versus stealing

Good question, WillW, and I hope this ties in and is helpful.

When right wingers talk about the free market, they mean grab what you can anyway that you can and never mind tomorrow.

Recently while reading about economics and trade in Germany I was struck by an interesting insight. In 1940, Germany was a trading partner with the Soviet Union. The following year, Germany invaded Russia. In both cases, goods flowed into Russia from Germany. In 1940 the flow was regulated for mutual benefit by a set of protocols derived from compromise and negotiation between the two parties as more or less equal partners. In 1941 the Germans attempted to simply grab and take what they wanted from Russia unilaterally.

Here is what interested me - it looks like the Germans spent more and got less in return by invading Russia and stealing what they wanted then they did in the previous year through cooperation and trade. If true, that would suggest an underlying principle at work here in free - may the biggest dog win - versus regulated - let's work together and cooperate - approaches to social relationships and economics.

Is it inherently more efficient to be fair and to cooperate than it is to let the market make decisions and allow people to grab and take whatever they want?

I am not even taking into consideration the long term damage done to the productive capacity of the conquered territory in Russia, nor to the human cost in lives and suffering of the invasion.

[gavodotcom]

19. Your rebuttal: Market failure.

You're almost making the exact argument that the definition in basic economics books of what 'market failure' is.

There's two kinds of economic failure:

- Government failure: the gov't intervenes in the market and ends up making the problem --the problem is whatever the gov't defines the problem to be -- worse.

- Market failure: the market fails to answer the 'for whom' question.

If you want a more complete description of various examples of market failure are, visit:

http://www.tutor2u.net/economics/content/topics/marketfail/market_failure.htm

There's other stuff on that page, like the argument for, say, environmental regulations...

Regardless of your economics verbiage, the meaning will be clear.

[Union Thug]

20. thanks! /eom

[ProfessorGAC]

21. Tell Them To Look at The Data

First, one of the most efficient uses of money in the whole country, whether i like it or not, is in defense. The money spent there, as a collective expenditure, has very high monetary velocity, and the value obtained for the whole economy after a development lag is one of the most efficient uses of money in this country. So, the gov't actually operates one of the most economically efficient concerns in U.S. history. I might wish the total cash spent was a lower amount, and i might think there are some short term deficiencies in defense, but in the long term, it's a highly efficient use of cash.

Secondly, if one looks at the total amount of gov't spending and transfer, the huge numbers make the gov't the largest corporation in the world. With no profit motive, the amount of cash lost in the system is small compared to any 10 combined companies with revenues approaching the federal gov't. Add up the top 10 U.S. firms and see the level of cash lost due to poor strategic decisions, bad investments, failure to recognize the dimunition of a formerly cash cow product line, accidents and workmen's comp awards due to systemic design issues, product liability penalties due to willful risk decisions, and fines levied by EPA and OSHA. Add those up! The gov't actually operates more efficiently than private enterprise as a percentage of total expenditure in the absolute, and is statistically identical to any of the individual firms.

I had grad students do this analysis as a project about 5 years ago. Three groups of 5 students each. They all ended up with the exact same results.

The data clearly show that gov't is NOT inherently less efficient than private enterprise.

Lastly, the simple fact is that the gov't operates within the free market! The gov't doesn't define the macroeconomy. The macroeconomy defines the parameters in which gov't operates. So, there is really no difference between the gov't and the free market. Anybody who uses the argument you are tying to rebut is showing their ignorance, since they are making a distinction without a difference.
The Professor