Tom S. wrote:
"Chip Jones" wrote:

Who cares about a system model for what comes next? American government
works best when we run it like a business,


Sounds nice, but it's a myth. One can't run a government like a business
because the rules are the inverse of one another (bureaucracy vs.
flexibility of decision making).


just like Enron, MCI, or any
major airline (say Eastern, Pan Am, TWA etc).


And those companies tired to run the business like a government.



Not nearly. There is quite a difference between inefficiency and
outright deception and fraud.

Failure to deliver by public agencies is often as much the fault of the
shareholders' (taxpayers) lack of investment as it is the fault of
management's incompetence. Government agencies can be as flexible as
large private companies, if they have some assurance of continuity of
budget and programs. But if all the management hours have to be spent
figuring out how to cut as opposed to what and how to deliver, then what
do you expect?


The bottom line is that you have little way of knowing if the company
you choose to run your ATC will operate like a "good" company or a bad
one... so would you rather have a Government agency screw it up, which
is at least somewhat under the scrutiny of press and public, or a
private company screw it up, which can hide its shady dealings until
it's too late.

It is easy to continue cutting an agency's budget, because we all "don't
want to pay taxes" and then complain that it is not producing. Then we
invested our "savings" in ENRON. Good deal. It would be an interesting
excercise to see how good an ATC system we might have now if all the
outright stock market fraud losses of the last 10 years had been
re-directed to government agencies instead of invested in the "private
sector".

If the general culture is that people are good, then a government agency
can produce good results just as well as a private one, given the
resources, especially in a monopoly industry such as ATC. If the
general culture is that people are bad, then I would rather have the
accountable, scrutinized agency doing the work, as opposed to a
self-serving, private one.

People are people whether in "private industry" or "government service"
and I can't quite see this idea that the people of one are somehow
"different" or "worse" than the other.