One thing I learned while working closely with the (Brazilian) government is that the government itself exists only because a law says so, and the most important difference between public service and private initiative is that the private sector has laws regulating what it can’t do while public sector can only do things (and offer services) that are stated in law. In short, outside the government you can do whatever you need as long as it’s not explicitly forbidden while public servants can only do what’s explicitly permitted.
Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality.
Finally, I must say that I started working with government agencies with the misconception they are lazy, underqualified, people, and nothing is further from what I encountered. The people I worked with were smart, well educated, intelligent, and had an unparalleled sense of public duty I’ve never seen elsewhere.
"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. " - Federalist 51
I wonder if Gorbachev had any pathway available to him that wouldn't have lead to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union? By the time he rose to power their economy was in such serious trouble it was a choice between reform or perpetual stagnation, but I don't see any way for Gorbachev to make the necessary reforms without triggering a coup attempt against him from the hardliners which was arguably the moment Soviet power was broken.
'What if Gorbachev succeeded in reforming the Soviet Union' is an interesting alternate history scenario I think. I'm not sure it's a realistic one though, the problems he faced were likely insurmountable.
> I wonder if Gorbachev had any pathway available to him that wouldn't have lead to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union?
I'm sure a slow transition, the way he seemed to intend, would have been more stable. A slower, steadier process could ensure smooth transitions to the post Glasnost state for all hardliners and other stakeholders from whom buy-in would be required. The way it happened, rushed through by Yeltsin, accelerated collapse created a vacuum that was quickly filled by powerful criminals (which is usually what happens when governments collapse - and this is a cautionary tale for Americans, BTW).
> I'm not sure it's a realistic one though, the problems he faced were likely insurmountable.
The Soviet Union was broken, and would need to drastically cut expenses in order to provide for its own citizens, but the situation could be engineered to make sure any vacuum happened in the international space in such a way anyone who stepped in would deeply regret it. Think many Afghanistans worth of problems.
He had inherited an empire held together by brute force. When this force weakened, intentionally or due to economics, it fell apart. It is hard to maintain an empire and be humane at the same time. And he wasn’t always, but even that wasn’t enough to keep everyone aligned. In 1991 former fellows tried to correct him but they failed, and he lost both the throne and the country. Yeltsin later betrayed democracy twice plausibly to save it from the restoration. So did other fellow leaders. There was hardly any other possible outcome after that.
It ended up much better than it might have? Some of the -stans were violent, but in areas without preexisting violence (pace Romania) the dissolution of the Union was remarkably peaceful.
I also work closely with the (Brazilian) government, and I can confirm that there are too many people who are smart, well educated, intelligent, and have an unparalleled sense of extracting money from government contracts
> while public servants can only do what’s explicitly permitted.
I think that is determined by structure of legal system, many systems the public servants can do whatever they want in pursuit of policy goals that has not been expressly forbidden, but of course should be able to make the case that it was in support of those goals.
Indeed - they have some very limited freedom, but the policy goals increase in detail on every level from the top and, with that, the set of allowable actions is reduced.
For instance, let's imagine you want to add a feedback form to a website - you need to track the data collected, make sure it's used only in the appropriate legal ways, that the infrastructure to host the data is procured within the budget already set up, and so on. They need to tread carefully not to step outside what government is authorized to do.
This is why I got involved in government work in the first place - free and open-source at least eased the procurement step - we only needed to prove the software was adequate and would not do anything not permitted by the rules that governed the adopting org.
You're right, I was erroneously conflating civil liability with generic personal consequences but the fact stands that the bits of government that have the most ability to act unilaterally in pursuit of doing their jobs without fear of personal consequence are some of the worst behaved.
> Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality.
This is in some ways talking about two different things.
Suppose you run the DMV like this. To do anything you need an appointment, to get an appointment takes 45 days, and appointments are scheduled back to back so even when you come for your appointment you have to wait for hours because previous appointments may have run over. In terms of minimizing the number of government workers this solution might be almost optimal -- they're all busy all of the time -- but in terms of wasting the public's time it's idiotic.
Now suppose you do the opposite. No appointments so you have to show up at 8AM and wait all day until someone can see you, because everyone shows up at 8AM, because if you show up at 3PM they'll be closed before you get in. This is also miserable.
What you really want is to allow appointments but not require them, and then give appointments priority. Then some proportion of slots would be unscheduled and filled with walk-ins, but those would also prevent anyone with an appointment from having to wait because they get priority, and appointments would be available two or three days out instead of weeks because you don't need a fully-packed schedule to prevent idle workers when any unscheduled slot just means they take one from the walk-in queue. Meanwhile if you absolutely have to get in today, you still have the option to get in line at 8AM.
Doing either of the dumber alternatives is the kind of government inefficiency that really pisses people off, and yet all three are basically the same in terms of how many government workers you need, because all three have them fully occupied with some combination of appointments and walk-ins.
Likewise, a lot of inefficiency comes from bad laws. Laws and regulations run the gamut from the obviously good (criminal penalties for homicide, ban on leaded gasoline) to the needlessly over-complicated (tax code, many business regulations), to the corrupt (certificate of need laws, many aspects of building/zoning codes, exclusionary financial regulations). The inefficiency here isn't just that you need too many government bureaucrats, though the more needless complexity there is the worse that gets. It's that the inefficiency bleeds into what the public has to do to comply with it, like wasting your time at the DMV. The government requires you to hire excessively many accountants and lawyers and compliance officers, or prohibits or bankrupts societally net-positive endeavors.
A body whose purpose is to ferret out and eliminate those kinds of inefficiencies has the potential to do good, because the government doesn't otherwise have a great accountability mechanism to prevent them, as evidenced by their widespread proliferation.
Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality.
Finally, I must say that I started working with government agencies with the misconception they are lazy, underqualified, people, and nothing is further from what I encountered. The people I worked with were smart, well educated, intelligent, and had an unparalleled sense of public duty I’ve never seen elsewhere.