in bureaucratic hell

[calimac]

I've just spent two and a half hours on the phone with Medicare representatives, trying to straighten out a problem with my late mother's claims.  That's on top of the hour I spent yesterday on the same thing.

Am I ready to disavow my liberal faith in government and let the lean and mean private sector take over our business?  Absolutely not, and here's why.

1) Most of these people were actually trying to be helpful, even if they didn't know anything, and went beyond the call of duty in trying to get me information.  Especially the last one, who was in the wrong department, but who listened when I explained that hers was the only department I could reach, and who really went the extra mile by contacting the right department (unreachable by outside phone) and getting a definitive answer, and chatting agreeably as we waited.

2) These departments that I was communicating with were those of a private contractor, not the government in the strict sense.  And I reached them because I was given the number by a volunteer assistance program whose representatives also took a little extra effort to help.

3) All around, it was far less frustrating than the oceans of time I spent waiting on hold and being shuttled back and forth to the same numbers that had previously been unable to help me, and being assured that something was done when it was not done, and being told I should have asked the previous person to do something they'd told me they could not do, that I had trying to set up AT&T internet service a few years ago.  In this case today, when I reported that someone else could not help me, I was listened to, and something else was tried.

Winston Churchill once said (quoting an old proverb, or so he claimed) that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others.  So I can say that government bureaucracies are the worst bureaucracies in the world, except for all the corporate ones.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, come, sir. Did you read my post? Did you see the declaration at the end that government bureaucracy is the worst kind, except for corporate ones. My faith in government is that it is fundamentally a good thing, despite the problems with its bureaucracy, and should not be replaced with the private sector.

Now, switch to my feelings about the other end, corporations. Did I say anything to the reverse contention, about how corporations should be abolished and their work taken over by the public sector? I did not. If your defense of corporations is merely to lead to the conclusion, "They should exist," we are in agreement.

Since I'm not using corporate bureaucracy to advocate the elimination of corporations any more than I'm permitting using government bureaucracy to advocate the elimination of government, there is no hypocrisy or lack of awareness of irony here. The reason for me to emphasize the one point over the other is that there currently is nobody of significance advocating the elimination of corporations - even the Occupy Wall Street wasn't calling for that - while there are plenty of people eager to use government bureaucracy as an excuse to at least emasculate if not "drown in the bathtub" government.

Had your last paragraph, emphasizing your satisfaction with Cox, been on the comment when I replied to it, I might have taken up the point then about corporate bureaucracies not being uniformly evil, and of how little difference that fact makes to the point.

The problem with your declaration that one can leave a bureaucracy for another bureaucracy (which may not even be true for much longer) is that it's so futile as to express a deep disconnect with reality. I thought about comparing it with the 1930s polemicists who insisted that democracy was dead and the only choice was between fascism and communism, with "you can have any color you want as long as it's black", etc.

In the end I gave four specific examples of how this supposed choice is futile. I direct your attention particularly to #4, the airlines, because here's an entire industry consisting of nothing but horrible customer-service corporations. I don't know how good Cox is being to other customers than you, but I've had mostly good experiences with Southwest. I thought they were a good company until I read about their anti-fat policies. I thought Jet Blue was a sensible airline until I read about the time they kept their passengers locked up in a parked plane for 6 hours. Bad behavior trumps good.

You say that you intended to present choice of corporations as merely an advantage, not a panacea, but in these cases, it's not even an advantage. Any airline is easily capable of screwing you over. No other firm offers what Amazon or Facebook do; you're handicapping yourself if you don't use them. And cable service here is a duopoly of two terrible bureaucracies.

Whereas, when it does work, competition is a panacea. I offered a downtown full of restaurants as a contrary example, and that usually works well. Competition keeps them on their toes, and the bad ones usually get weeded out pretty quickly. The very fact that it can be a panacea highlights the ridiculousness of the claim when it's not even an advantage.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It appears that we agree slightly more than I had grasped, which is a good thing. I'm not sure if you noticed that my comments on choice between corporations included the statement that I don't think there is as much competition between them as I would like, in many cases. Perhaps we would both like to see markets that are genuinely competitive, and government agencies that are doing jobs essential to government and are not expected to be competitively organized (I recall, for example, a passage by Ayn Rand that denounces the idea of competing police forces as demonstrating a failure to understand the essential nature of government), even if we differ drastically on the range of functions that are essentially governmental.

To go further than this we would have to talk about things like the economic history of the twentieth century and the political economy of large corporations, which would get lengthy. I feel that I have already intruded too much on your post, and will not impose on you further.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I posted because I see too many people who are outside of that range. There are many, too many, people who would use a tiring experience with government bureaucracy as an excuse to decry government entire; some of them even cite a bad past experience as what opened their eyes to the evils of government.

But they never say the equivalent about equally annoying experiences with corporate bureaucracies. Strange.