There is a lesson for government in what business is doing of late, which is cutting costs and payrolls in order to put its financial house in order.
It is a painful experience, though, even for those whose jobs are safe because they're in charge of the cutbacks, and because of that it may never be effectively implemented in government.In both the public and private sector the problem begins in the same way. Offices are perpetuated though their work is finished; officers extend their power by adding staff; departments grow though they duplicate the work of others.
The extreme is when departments in some companies actually compete with other segments of the business, duplicating processes and products and even cutting prices to take business away from each other.
Big Business periodically allows such things to happen, taking no action until it has to, that is, when the works gets so plugged up that no cash flows to the bottom line and no amount of exhortation can move the bureaucracy.
At that point it sometimes means the boss must go, as in IBM, Goodyear, IBM, AlliedSignal, Apple, Westinghouse Electric and a couple dozen more large companies during the past few years. It means financial writeoffs too.
In brief, it takes trauma before Big Business moves, but when it finally does, it usually gets the job done.
Sears and Citicorp, both once hobbled by financial and management problems, are examples. They cut away thousands of jobs, and their earnings soared.
It's different in government. Pain is less acceptable, and traumas are tolerated, as decades of deficits show. There is no need to respect the bottom line, as in the private sector. Disaster doesn't occur; it is put off.
The imperative of red ink is missing, and so is a sense of urgency that if real corrections aren't made there will be an early day of reckoning. Juggled books hide the facts, and spending increases are called cuts.
And, of course, government can always go to the public and borrow money. Companies that repeatedly try that, and then make no improvement in finances and show no real plan to regain solvency, find the loan window closed.
In 1940, there were twice as many manufacturing workers as government workers; today, there are more government workers. In 1992, government's monthly payroll was $36 billion; in 1960, it was just one-third that.
Meanwhile, hardly any survey of taxpayer satisfaction fails to turn up a high level of discontent with the delivery of government services - and service, of course, is the public sector's bottom line.
Business can be faulted for bureaucratic growth, for tolerating activities that don't contribute to the community or the bottom line, for poor products, for disrupting the lives of workers they shouldn't ever have hired ...
But eventually it gets the painful job done.