San_Diego_Matt wrote:If things are so messed up and you've got it all figured out, maybe you should run for office and straighten us all out? Of course that would mean you'd have to become the very thing you seem to despise so much
My general position is that the public sector often messes up more things than they fix when expanded beyond their basic charter. They are necessary for many things (defense, infrastructure, establishing and enforcing laws) and ineffective as well as most that work in the public sector are rarely held accountable for their own actions and often have a job for life regardless of their performance, or lack thereof. I am for smaller government and comparable pay and benefits for similar work in the private sector, not no government at all.
As an example: when I gave a one week training seminar to entire local county staff engineering office many years ago on how to create and use a database (this was 1995), a majority of them wanted to create a program to track and monitor their accrued vacation and sick pay - the assumption was that some of the public employees in the payroll department might be as incompetent as some of their own co-workers and they wanted to double check their accuracy so they did not lose any potential benefits. As many here in the public sector obtain their jobs through nepotism or as political rewards, there is a lower standard of performance expected for most public worker in my experience compared to their peers in the private sector. Here, the public sector employee often also receives much better compensation for a similar job, especially the employees that have been on the payroll for more than 10 years.
I suggested creating a new program to monitor the public works projects under development, who was assigned to each, what was in progress and as they were completed the history would ber saved - that might be a better use of a simple database to implement during that week, but that was shot down by the department head and we did a redundant personal payroll project instead.
As to your suggestion that I run for office it just won't work here - unless you are a member of the inside establishment and are supported and endorsed by the public worker's labor unions, you will not win elective office in my state or county. I would love to be Mayor of our County for a single term and reform some things (several folks have asked me to run this year) - but I realize that much can not be reformed due to existing public worker union contracts and I would not be as effective as I could be.
It is the same in California as well and because of that you state is in trouble as well:
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon1123sg.html
