The companies that bought the operations of GPO have since sold these
operations to foreign companies. Not an alarming thing in & of itself,
but does the US really wanna depend on other countries' businesses
to provide for its print.info.needs?
Moral to the story: Something doesn't have to be essential to be
crucial.
Hoping the US formulates a single coherent Information Policy
like most other developed countries (before 2001 would be nice),
Tony
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>(1) It's based on a political assumption that government should
>only provide "essential" services. That's certainly a debatable
>assumption. However, there are some services that the government
>provides that are not "essential" (national parks, for instance),
>yet still provide value to the citzenry. It may be true that
>these services could be run privately in many instances, but
>there are many good reasons why they often are *not* privatized--
>a main reason being that there's not enough profit in a lot of
>them to make it worth the private sector's time. I don't think
>national parks are notorious for providing massive positive cash
>flow, for example. Yet, a lot of people would be pissed off if
>the government suddenly stopped providing these valuable yet
>"non-essential" services.
>
>(2) Your comparison to airline, computer administration and
>health care workers is an inaccurate analogy. You say "280,000
>gov't bureaucrats have gone away" as if this is remotely the same
>thing as 280,000 airline workers going on strike or something.
>It's not. "Gov't Bureacracy" is not a narrow field. Perhaps we
>feel no impact because the 280,000 federal workers who've been
>furloughed are not from one profession (like computer
>administrators or doctors), but are spread over thousands of
>different professions from park rangers to secretaries to
>accountants to technicians. A better analogy might be that it has
>been like asking 600 different corporations in different kinds of
>businesses to lay off 500 people each. About 300,000 people
>dropping out of the *whole* work force is significant, but it's
>impact would not be as obvious as 300,000 dropping out of a
>single profession. And "Bureacracy" is not a single profession.
>
>
>
All reasonable and fair points, Greg.
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