I'm sorry that this is getting more and more off-topic... William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com> wrote:

Delivery of all social services has clearly been shown to be cheaper when done by government, when costs of fund collection, advertisement, and administration are included. Private charity is always more expensive, even when partly done with volunteer labor. The best numbers I have at hand are 3% government (US Food Stamps) versus 17% private (United Way) for administrative costs to delivered services. And when advertising and fund collection are added, many non-profit "charities" spend upwards of 50% on overhead!

Huh? Sure you forgot to figure in the cost of collection of taxes and counted only disbursement (and did you count enforcement and what groceries spend on processing food stamps?) Most of what charities spend is cost of fundraising. When you figure _that_ in, you'll get government efficiency well below that of any private organization. And, of course, it is always much simplier to get funds for "charity" by telling people they'd better pay or go to jail. What you compare is charity and legalized racket. In fact, the social cost of welfare is enormous. It created generations of people which cannot and don't want to earn living. A culture of entitlement, if you like. No charity ever made recipients "entitled" to anything.

Another outstanding example is Public Radio and Television.

Huh? "I have thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from?" That's outstanding? The question is if TV is really a useful medium for education. I'd rather contend it is not. Those monely would be much better spent on providing traditional reading-based education.

Meanwhile, the hourly content has been diminished to insert the advertising. A classic documented case of the inefficiency of privatization....

No. Just don't buy TV. TV is pure entertaintment. It is passive. It is counter-intellectual. If it dies this will be a better world. Privatization is not about perpetuating losing propositions, ok?

Single payer medical services has also been shown to be cheaper than "insurance" systems, especially when advertisement and administration costs are counted. True, they have a tendency to reduce "choice", but so do the private commercial US HMOs, whether profit or non-profit.

That surely explains why in Canada people wait for operations for years. As old Soviet saying goes "Free medicine is fine if you're not interested in results". And sure we all like gag orders and Medicare steadily going bankrupt.

Centralized government recyling also comes to mind. Private commercial firms have more administrative overhead costs than goverment programs, even when governments are handling the fee collection (taxes).

Ah, yes. Tell that to local govts in Silicon Valley. For some reason i do not think BFI is a government department.

More importantly to the case at hand, government use built the recycling waste stream to a point where commercial efforts could be mounted, and built a chain of suppliers and consumers.

Government can encourage commerce by tax exemptions. It shouldn't _replace_ commerce.

This is similar to the Internet experience. Goverment use built the net to a point where commercial activity could occur.

Sorry, the case of Internet is too much touted precisely because it's one rare government-funded program which didn't go bust. There's a million of others which silently died after wasting billions. Or if we talk about networks should we drag out the corpse of OSI? OSI consumed by orders of magnitude more resources than original Internet development.

We already had commercial telecommunications companies; they gave us X.25 ... and now, ATM.

X.25 was fine for its time. It still processes all credit card and ATM transactions. ATM (another one) is going to be dead pretty soon, as new generation of IP routers will roll out. And, ah, yes. ATM figured prominently in NAP-related papers, ok? vBNS is ATM-based. _Who_ is promoting that insanity? And don't forget that between a fuzzball and a cisco router is the huge distance.

I'm afraid your emotional bias is showing. You are responsible for the government you have, and it spends its money exactly as you permit it.

I'm currntly paying taxes to the government which doesn't even allow me to have a voice in how it spends those taxes. It doesn't neglect to collect it, though. Sorry, but all governments are literally nothing more than forms of protection racket. They "protect" their captive constitutients from other governments. I certainly never heard of any private party declaring a war, on, say, America. How is it different from a bunch of gangs sharing a city and extorting "tax" from local businesses to "protect" from other gangs? Sorry, having to choose between two morons is not exactly a big difference from having to accept the only one moron on top. I'm always amazed that people are so impressed by the officious decorum so they fail to see the principle behind it.

If not, you have the right to attempt to change it. Depends on how self-importantly you think of your own life....

I try to change things i don't like. Sometimes i succeed. Guess whose idea it was to eliminate the "reseller" surcharges, which in turn made the present-day $20/mo Internet access possible? Or who was one of founders of the first public network on some 1/6 of the Earth landmass? --vadim