“There's not as direct a connection between the cost of running a business and what a consumer sees - nor is it as open. Corporate executive compensation is a good example. Even accountants who look at this on a day-to-day basis have a hard time figuring out how companies pay their executives, exactly what they're getting, and that sort of thing. Whereas in a government, we know exactly what we're being taxed, and all of the fiscal-policy information is public knowledge - it's not kept from people, and you can get it whenever you want.”
“When you privatize government operations, contract them out, and make the assumption that the marketplace is going to do the work for you in terms of making it efficient and managing it in a frugal sense, you're usually disappointed - because it's not going to happen. You've still got to be a good manager. You've still got to watch how the dollars are spent as if they were your own. And we don't do that nearly often enough.”
“What we want it to mean is that we want our government to be frugal and to watch the bottom line and to concern itself with its customers - in other words, taxpayers - as we imagine businesses to do, you know, that their bottom line is a concern for pleasing their customers and so that sales remain steady and rising over the years. Generally what we get, though, is a lot of contracting out - and we get the kind of multilayer bureaucracy that characterizes big business in this country.”
