I’d like to see a few corporations appoint CEOs and CFOs who think the corporate model is inherently flawed and unable to deliver goods and services in nearly as efficient a manner as the public sector. I’ll bet you anything those corporations fail to do much of anything efficiently.
In case you’re wondering, I’m making an analogy to this (h/t Jason):
Fox Business host John Stossel on Sunday asserted that most government was unnecessary because companies like Walmart would spontaneously provide assistance to disaster victims “in many more ways” than the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could.
“Ever feel like government makes too many plans that come to naught?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told Stossel during a segment on Fox & Friends. “It’s kind of a bold idea. You’re saying that not every human activity needs to be planned from above. Some things spontaneously work themselves out pretty well.”
According to Stossel, Americans would be better off with less government and more “spontaneous order,” a term coined by economist Friedrich Hayek which states that order will naturally emerge from chaos.
“If you hadn’t seen a skating rink, you would say, ‘No, you need skating police, people go in this direction,’” Stossel observed. “Think of how much of life is spontaneous… Jazz, there’s no direction. So much of life is spontaneous, but our instinct is to say, ‘Government, give us a plan.’”
The Fox Business host said that one example of government over-planning was natural disasters.
“After Katrina, Walmart and private charities helped people in many more ways than FEMA did,” Stossel opined. “Because FEMA is incompetent because government tends to be. But also Walmart everyday needs to know what people need, and they were ready. They had more weather forecasters than some of the local governments do.”
I’m not sure what’s the most ridiculous part of that. The comparison of disaster relief to ice skating and fucking jazz??? The notion that what hampered FEMA’s Katrina recovery efforts was a dearth of weather forecasters? There’s literally too much stupid to parse here.
The bigger issue, though, is that there are a great many people who don’t believe government can do anything right, and who want to be put in charge of government. It’s like someone who doesn’t believe that cars are safe, and who announces ahead of time that every time they get behind the wheel of a car, they’re going to drive it headfirst into the nearest tree to prove that cars are not safe.
Also, in the event that a government agency does mess something up, dimwits like Stossel are usually among the first to fault them for not planning for the specific contingency that occurred in that instance. So government doesn’t need to plan for every eventuality, just the ones that are actually going to happen. And it’s a failing of government that people are not psychic.
