The moral high road

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

Recently, I heard someone state they viewed government employees and their agencies as true servants of the citizenry and far morally superior to private enterprises and their employees.

This was the shock of my life, no joke.

I have always viewed government employees (except the military) as personages that could not find a job in the real world. I am not trying to be insulting, although I am sure at the same time that I am.

I need further to state, this is merely my perception, the truth may be something different. It is just the way I always have seen it. Can't even tell you where I got such an idea, it has been with me for so long.

But every time I have to deal with a government entity, it is reinforced.

The first thing wrong with government entities is that they are a monopoly. Monopolies have no incentives to serve their customers – simply, if you do not like their service, tough.

You have no choice, you have to deal with them no matter what.

For instance, I recently became eligible for Social Security (although if I ever have to go collect it, it will kill me). What if you don't like the service you get in a Social Security office? Where are you going to go to find better service? There is no other place, they are a monopoly.

Teachers' unions know this very well. This is why they fight charter schools and other parental choices hammer and tong. They don't want your children to have a choice if they have a bad teacher. Ruining your child's life is a small price to pay to protect an incompetent teacher's job.

I have always felt competitiveness forced morality. Don't like the way a car dealer treats you? You have always had the opportunity to go to another (although the government may soon force us to buy Volts – no doubt part of our health insurance).

Governments could give us choices, if only we demanded it.

Let's take the Department of Motor Vehicles. What if your state put these services out for bid every couple of years? What, if say, next year, New Jersey won the right to operate the DMV in your state? Maybe a couple of years later, due to service and costs, Iowa offers your state a better deal. What would be wrong with that?

After all, since the state is spending your money for these services, shouldn't you get the best you can for your money?

I live in Gwinnett County, Georgia. This is northeast suburban Atlanta. Not long ago, this was rural Georgia, but the city moved out here (we now have more residents than the entire state of Wyoming).

However, did we consolidate the governments of all the little formerly far-flung towns in Gwinnett County? Of course not. Every one of them ran to Washington and collected a bunch of federal money (your money and my money) and each built a city hall, the next one more ostentatious than the last.

We have over 50 governments in this county when we could get by with just one or two. An outrageous waste of taxpayer money.

Something different happened next door in north Fulton County. Two areas recently became cities, Sandy Springs and Johns Creek.

But they did it the economical way. There is an article about Sandy Springs in the July 28 edition of "The Economist."

Sandy Springs is a city of 100,000 people, and other than the fire and police departments (mandated by the State of Georgia to be city employees), Sandy Springs has only seven direct employees. These seven employees have 401k plans for retirement. The city offices are rented in a high-rise office building. All other services are done by contractors.

Jacobs Engineering, of California, maintains the parks and provides the municipal judges (they won this contract from CH2MHill, another consultancy that had it for the first two years of Sandy Springs' existence).

According to the article, Sandy Springs' rainy day fund stands at $21 million and it spends 1/4 of its annual budget on capital projects. Sandy Springs has no longterm liabilities.

My business, which I built, faces stiff competition every day. And whether I want to be moral and ethical or not (I do) I must be, for everyone of my clients can go somewhere else if they think I am not treating them right. This is the forced moral high road.

Why can't I deal with government, at all levels, that is subject to the same standards? It looks like a couple of cities have figured out how.

Maybe a few recently bankrupt ones in California would like to visit Georgia, Sandy Springs, Georgia, and see how it is done.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.