Can A Liberal Help Me Understand This True Story?

Can A Liberal Help Me Understand This True Story?

Why is that when I called Amazon today (motto: the most customer centric company in the world) did it take them 27 seconds to answer the phone while when I called the DMV they said hold time was 3 hours or longer?
Why? why? Or, how is it conceivable that liberals lack the IQ to derive any lessons from what they see right under their noses every day? Are our modern liberal DVM bureaucrats and their liberal political masters any different than the soviet bureaucrats who calmly watched soviet citizens wait in long lines for hours each day to buy bread and milk??

 

I don't know where you live but obviously your state DMV is underfunded. I can typically walk into mine and be out in ten minutes.

Some jobs are best for private enterprise. Others require government.

Did you know you can't build a nuclear power plant without government money? They cost too much and the ROI is too long for private investors. So much for the free market when you don't like it!

 

so would you say it needs more funding or more competition?

 

Has nothing to do with liberals, but bureaucracies. Of course you may blame all bureaucracies on liberals, but even your GOP grows gov't and adds bureaucrats if it is something they want.

I had to go to my local social security office recently, and was amazed at how fast they got me in and out. Much more streamlined than when I once took a poor neighbor to try to get food stamps. I was there for much of the day, in the car, waiting on her.

 

Without knowing the first thing about the service load or efficiency of the department, there is no way to know. It could be a lot of things. But your argument fails because it only applies to your one example.

Medical insurance companies have been killing people for decades. That is the free market at work.

 

The difference between old liberals like myself and any conservative voter is that I see a place for gov't, a Commons, while the con voter (unless you try to take away their social security and they are not elites) or in regards to our War Dept. don't seem to want gov't at all, except in a very limited manner. They believe the free market will police itself, and no business will build you an unsafe house, cutting costs, maxing profits. Or sell you something unsafe, defective, and so on. I believe this is just fanciful thinking myself. Because of human nature , which has always trumped rationality and reason ever since the rise of civilization. You really cannot trust humans to always do the right thing, or as Heinlein said, "never trust in a man's better side, for he may not have one!".

If we were all responsible, moral human beings there would be no problem. But laws exist, regulations exist because we simply are not. And that is the actual reality in which we live instead of the fanciful fantasies of some conservatives.

To be fair, there are plenty of these fanciful fantasies on both sides, left and right. And it has always been a problem. What we sorely lack on both sides is simple pragmatism. If something does not work, then change it until you find something that does work. We allow ideological beliefs to insure this happens rarely. Which is why I detest purity in ideology. It creates more problems than it can solve and solves so few. But being bound by anything is a risk, especially when it has no need for pragmatism.

 

What a dumb post. Amazon was created by a liberal and is run by liberals and it is efficient as it can be. DMVs are run by people who have no clue what they are doing, and that includes conservatives among their ranks.

 

That was proven false in a dramatic way when the market collapsed in 2008. Greenspan and Paulson both stated unequivocally that market discipline failed.

This is a cornerstone of free market principles. If market discipline cannot be trusted, then the entire theory of free markets fails. When asked why it failed, Greenspan - the great crusader of free markets - shrugged.

Beyond that, while markets will eventually correct themselves, we cannot always survive the corrections!!! The natural market correction for 2008 would have likely been a 25 year global depression. That is NOT an acceptable correction mechanism.

In short, the notion that free markets can be allowed to run amok is proven beyond a doubt to be false. Governments must play a role in regulating markets and industry.

Ron Paul wanted to do away with environmental laws and let it all be sorted out in the courts. Can you even imagine the disaster that would be if the only way to regulate industry was through law suits!!! Any given case could require ten years in court.

 

It has to do with management. Some managers run a tight ship and some are in over their head. A perfect example is how Obama ran the country and how Trump is running the country.

 

It's true that some are pitiful, but not all. However, Amazon is dependent on customer satisfaction- they have competition, you have choices. The DMV does not have competition and you do not have a choice. Amazon had motivation to perform in order to profit, the DMV is a bureaucracy that has nothing to lose by not trying harder or caring.

I thin that answers your question?

 

Good points. We humans are unfit to live in large civil communities unless perhaps it is under a caste system. That way everyone knows their place and the role they are to fulfill.

Really, we are more fit to live in smaller tribal units.

 

i'm assuming that by "liberal" you mean "anyone left of mussolini" because that's just what that word means in america now, so i'll answer.

and my answer is: what the **** are you even talking about? what point are you attempting to make? the dmv is somehow a socialist institution? what?

 

Did you know the prohibitive cost of construction is not the construction, but in the extensive permitting process?

You can't blame the free market for a problem created by market regulation.

 

Today is Sunday, your DMV is open today?

 

The free market self policing, driven by the free market itself is just an ideal and ideals are just that, nothing more. But the cons mistake the ideal for reality when reality could not care less about any ideal. I think this is fairly irrefutable.

So how would the free market not create monopolies? Indeed they do arise as you get a freer free market because of the avarice and greed that is a part of human nature which flowers when someone has the ability to drive out competition, because they are bigger, until they control the market. Then the free market in that sector is nonexistent, even as some might say the free market does exist.

In order for something like a free market to be sustained, over monopoly, there must be the involvement of a gov't by and for the people to insure greed driven capitalists cannot game the system. For the same reason we cannot depend upon immoral men not having sex with 13 year olds. To have a hands off approach to capitalism is no different than depending upon human beings to not abuse others in other areas of human existence. Why is capitalism so sacred as to leave it to its own devices, driven by human nature? It is utter nonsense to me.

 

Probably are better fit to live in smaller tribal units, for that is how we evolved. But civilization arose, and realistically there is no going back, regression. And so we must pragmatically find out what works and what does not work. Humans are very intelligent, and then they start believing in right or left ideology, having no use for pragmatism and that would explain why we have still not solved problems inherit in civilization. Both left and right have tunnel vision, yielded by ideology.

 

DMV's are state agencies that run on the kind of fiscal constraints all state governments run on. If customer satisfaction becomes enough of an issue so fees can be raised to improve service and hire higher quality employees things will change.

But, obviously the OP has an agenda he's trying to push.............if only ineffectually.

 

So what - we should not have any regulations in relation to nuclear power plants ?

This is not a black vs white issue .... all or nothing. I agree that our regulatory and regulations are a nightmare and just stupid in many cases, however in some cases regulations are needed.

I worked for a decade in environmental clean up .. bioremediation was one of my specialties - getting bacteria to eat contaminants. Some of the regulations were just stupid and made it harder and way more costly to clean up sites.

The natural tendency of any Gov't organization is to increase its size and power. It does so by creating regulations - creating more work for itself - justifying hiring more people. "Pyramid Building".

The problem is that there is no legitimate oversight - the Fox's are in charge of the hen-house. On the other side of the coin - some of the regulations are put in place by the Oligopolies (who influence the regulators) in order to keep competition out.

I call it the Oligopoly-Bureaucracy Fusion Monster. These two forces work together increase their power via regulation.

In addition - you get insurance companies and Lawyers in on the game - also looking to pad their own pockets. Its just a mess.

 

You seem to think that adequate funding and proper attitude are proportional and go up or down together.
DMV clerks average $17-18 per hour. That's about double the wage of McDonalds people, which is more like $8-9- and the DMV has a lot more benefits.
I can get service a lot faster at Mc D's, and attitude usually as good. Granted, McD's people make more errors, but the DMV has botched a few for me over the years.
It's attitude, a personal characteristic. To assume that people's work skills and attitudes are directly related to what they are paid tells me you have never been in the position of managing people.

 

Non-sequitur. The statement was not a refutation of regulation. It was a refutation of the claim that nuclear power plants are not profitable, and therefor unviable in a free market system. The claim, “you can’t build a nuclear power plant without government money” is false. You can do that, and the problem that the poster illustrates is not caused by capitalism. It’s caused by government. It stands then to reason that a problem caused by government should be subsidized by government.

If the government has a compelling interest to ensure that a business enterprise is safe, I don’t see any reason at all why the financial burden of such an interest needs to be solely born by the enterprise. Building a nuclear power plant is a ten year process, with the majority of those years spent navigating bureaucratic hurdles. Those hurdles are what makes a certain amount of public funding necessary, and not in some failure of capitalism to find a way to make nuclear power plants profitable without such funding.

The rest of your post deals with regulatory capture. This is a major issue with the reliance on government to protect the public interest. There is absolutely no need for the regulator to place the public interest above his own self interest. Go ask the good people of Flint if they think that government regulation of public resources is a fail safe against corruption.

Not to mention the other “dark” side of the regulatory coin. It is not in the regulator’s interest to approve new technologies if the outcome of those technologies is not 100% guaranteed to produce a favorable outcome. No regulator gets punished for preventing new technologies in the market space. They only get punished for allowing technologies that prove to be dangerous. You see this problem at the FDA, for example. There very well may have been hundreds of new medications that if approved would have saved thousands of lives, but no regulator will get punished for preventing public access to these medications because you can’t link a life lost to a medication that wasn’t approved.

How many people have died due to the absence of a nuclear power plant that wasn’t approved? It’s impossible to say. We do know exactly how many people died due to accidents at power plants, so it skews the regulations.

 

Commies don't quite get the concept of service, so of course you don't understand the idea.

Sure, capitalist systems like disneyland have enormous wait times, but those are voluntary. We don't need to go to disneyland (thank gawd my kids are grown and can go by themselves).

Anyway, the point is that those wait times are too long, and I personally blame the left. If we got rid of the state, there would be an incentive to keep those lines moving to the point that when I want to renew my DL, I can just walk in there and be out in under ten minutes.

Since communists have no incentive to get rid of those lines, they keep getting longer.

 

so what's the government got to do with the left

 

You got that right about the tunnel vision. Im not so sure about calling us very intelligent. Given that we make the same mistakes over and over. We may never find what works because we never give anything enough time to work.

 

O.K.....you can now spell out how they kill.

 

The left is all about giving it more control.