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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Angle]

I actually wasn't thinking that such things would be government owned - they'd be non-government non-profits operated for public benefit.

[GavJ]

Yeah that's fine too, I don't think it really matters much.  You'll need subsidizing them either way to outcompete capitalist alternatives.

But as long as such subsidized NGO industries cannot legally have dividend payouts, stock is held equally by employees at the very least (more ideally, no stock at all and surpluses can go back to the tax pool?), and possibly other restrictions like maximum salary ratios, etc. then it's fine to be civilian-run instead of government.

[Angle]

No, I don't think you need to be subsidized. You simply have to be as efficient as the capitalist alternatives without needing as much of a profit margin, and I think we can easily be more efficient.

[GavJ]

You simply have to be as efficient as the capitalist alternatives without needing as much of a profit margin

That's pretty much impossible by definition. The capitalist system is specifically optimized and designed to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible. You'd have to provide a pretty strong argument/evidence to be convincing that some non-profit can magically be more efficient without outside help, IMO.

[Angle]

Well, it depends on how you determine efficient - I figure that if you make 75% as many of a product, but they last twice as long and perform twice as well, then all else being equal, you're more efficient. Others may disagree.

I'd also like to point out that most capitalist industries are actually not very efficient - They have loads of dumb mistakes they make. And especially, they're not very good at adapting to new circumstances, because of how large they are. A system of smaller, independently mobile organizations that communicate, coordinate & compete should be far better at adapting and innovating.

[RedKing]

Government anything has a hard time being efficient though. (And I say this as a former government contractor).

1: Regulations. For all that private-sector companies complain about being regulated to death, they've got nothing on what the public sector has to go through. Need more paper? You have to fill out this OS-723 Supplemental Office Supplies Request Form, which will be processed in 6-8 months time. Oh, you want color paper too? You'll also need this C-11 Supplementary Chromatic Indicator rider to the OS-723.

Private sector? "Here's $20, go run to Staples."

2: Inertia. Some (NOT ALL, but definitely some) career government employees know that it damn near takes an act of Congress to get them fired. Which, once they figure this out, means they're not doing a damn thing. Even when they hold positions which create a procedural bottleneck. When I was with ATF, all new software requests had to go through one person for administrative approval. This woman, as far as I can tell, barely did a goddamned thing all day. Requests sat there for YEARS unlooked at. Apparently, she went through them in alphabetical order by the name of the application, rather than chronological or by importance. So lots of people got approved for Adobe Acrobat. No one ever got Z-Com. I saw this brought to the attention of an Assistant Director, and he just shrugged and said "Yeah, we know."

3: Inflated longevity pay. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be rewarded for long careers, but combined with #2 above, it means that you have some truly terrible, nonproductive and even counterproductive employees who hang around forever and are getting six-figure salaries because of it. I nearly wept when I saw the pay grade info for some of the people at the agency who couldn't hold down an office temp job in the private sector, but were making over $100,000.


Those three things alone make it almost impossible for government enterprises to come anywhere near private enterprise in efficiency. Now, the counterbalance to that is that no agency head gets anywhere near the obscene compensation of your average CEO...

[Sergarr]

You simply have to be as efficient as the capitalist alternatives without needing as much of a profit margin

That's pretty much impossible by definition. The capitalist system is specifically optimized and designed to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible. You'd have to provide a pretty strong argument/evidence to be convincing that some non-profit can magically be more efficient without outside help, IMO.

Efficient in short-term.

As a lot of capitalist societies shows, pure capitalism system cannot deal with the task of maintaining the efficiency in long-term without ecology tanking hard.

Also judging by current overproduction issues the efficiency of modern capitalism is already too high.

[smjjames]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/05/us/norad-air-threat/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

From the frosted windows bit, sounds like a depressurization.

[Sergarr]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/05/us/norad-air-threat/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

From the frosted windows bit, sounds like a depressurization.

It says Thursday in the article, but it is Friday already? Shouldn't it have ran out of fuel already?

[RedKing]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/05/us/norad-air-threat/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

From the frosted windows bit, sounds like a depressurization.

Yup. Payne Stewart type deal.

Sad.

Wonder if they'll shoot it down if it looks like it's going to hit a Cuban populated area?

[smjjames]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/05/us/norad-air-threat/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

From the frosted windows bit, sounds like a depressurization.

It says Thursday in the article, but it is Friday already? Shouldn't it have ran out of fuel already?

Probably one of those mistakes that they make when they don't check their writing before they publish. Or maybe it was late, like 11:30 or something.

As for running out of fuel, I dunno, and as for shooting it down, from where CNN is showing it, it seems to be passing over the southern coast of Cuba, so, theres probably no danger now.

Looks like it'll go down pretty close to Jamaica.

[mainiac]

Private sector has the exact same problems with the last two, in my experience.  The first one is an idealized wish for what the private sector does.  I'm thinking about an office that was paying through the nose to rent new computers that were unneeded for the job (viewing pdfs) every year when a decent IT department could have solved the problem for like half the budget.  But hey, there was money for rentals in the budget not for procurement.

[RedKing]

You see that kind of budget stovepiping and "pennywise, pound foolish" thing in all large organizations, I'm afraid -- private and public.

[GavJ]

Regardless of all of this, you still need to subsidize the new companies for the plan to work.

Because even if government (or civilian non-profit) and private for-profit are EQUALLY efficient, all you'd end up with is simply another set of competitors and both would stick around indefinitely.

The goal is to completely wipe out capitalist industry, so equally efficient wouldn't be good enough anyway. It needs to be overwhelmingly more competitive, which still implies at least some subsidy.

[Angle]

Well, Remember, you're competing for market share, not profit. So all you really need to do is pull a significant enough portion of the market away. Ideally, these'd be more than just a set of organizations, these'd be a whole counter society, with people dedicated to analyzing, critiquing, and improving it. With a support base like that, and a set of people deliberately altering their patterns of consumption so work best with this new system, it could definitely be competitive.