PUBLIC NEEDS AND PRIVATE WANTS

...Roper Organization, Roger Seasonwein Associates, Cambridge Reports, Inc., and Louis Harris and Associates polls, cited in Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider, The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind (New York: The Free Press, 1983) Chapter 9. Warren E. Miller, Arthur H. Miller, and Edward Schneider, American National Election Studies Data Sourcebook: 1952-1978 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), esp...

...For instance, where private firms provide goods and services such as nursing home care, scientific research, or weapons manufacture on contract to the government, they are subject to many of the constraints of the nonmarket sphere, including more politics and red tape, and less clearly delineated bottom lines...

...Without minimizing its importance, the dirty tricks and subsequent coverup by the Nixon administration were hardly heinous crimes...

...While 58 percent of the Swedish leaders favored equal pay, only 12 percent of the Americans supported the goal...

...This leaves government with only those tasks that are incapable of being neatly packaged, stripped of political content, and sold over the counter to individual consumers...

...While self-interested behavior (nepotism or high executive salaries) and conspicuous consumption (expense-account living and opulent office quarters) are roundly condemned in government, they are considered an acceptable part of doing business in the private sector...

...Everyone seems to agree that government is too big...

...CONVERSELY, WHERE GOVERNMENT-OWNED corporations operate commercial ventures in a competitive marketplace, their behavior is more akin to that of private firms than to other government agencies...

...It is much more difficult to please a constituency of 235 million (the nation) or even 100,000 (a medium-sized city), than it is to satisfy the individual households that select their own market output...

...While 44 percent of the Swedes favored a top limit placed on salaries, only 17 percent of the Americans concurred...

...There is no mechanism equivalent to the voting box that allows us to regularly pass judgment on the aggregation of individual consumer choices...

...It affects our views toward government, both in its romantic notion of a nation of autonomous, self-interested producers and consumers, and through its impact on the way we utilize government...

...The most popular criticism of government is that it operates in the absence of market-like pressures...

...Nonmarket output can only be purchased collectively by citizens...

...For instance, in 1985, the entire federal government spent $259 million on advertising, less than the amounts spent by Proctor & Gamble (1.6 billion), Sears Roebuck ($800 million), and thirty other individual corporations...

...318 Moreover, could a private firm achieve these objectives in a way that wouldn't violate widely held beliefs on individual rights and selfgovernance...

...As a result, what constitutes waste in government is not necessarily waste in the private sector...

...Even if the constant exposure of government waste or corruption serves a public purpose, it is likely to be misconstrued as evidence that government is less efficient or more corrupt than the private sector, rather than an indication that it is more closely watched...

...The desirability of private services, however, has less to do with the efficiency of the private sector than with widespread awareness that private services offer higher-priced and more exclusive output...

...when the need is for social cohesion, not rugged individualism...

...Reagan masterfully exploited the widespread discontent with the public sector, portraying big government as the single greatest cause of inflation, unemployment, energy shortages, family breakups, crime, and national insolvency...

...Robert B. Reich, The Next American Frontier (New York: Times Books, 1983), pp...

...Not surprisingly, it is easier to satisfy efficiency criteria when there is no line above which expenditures are automatically treated as wasteful, and when the pursuit of self-interest is considered a virtue, not a vice...

...to wine and dine customers with $100 lunches or luxury boxes at sports stadiums is excessive...

...These include maintaining the delicate ecological balance of the environment in a time of technological revolution...

...Bureau of Census Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1986 (Washington, DC: 106th edition) pp...

...John Robinson, "The Ups and Downs and Ins and Outs of Ideology," Public Opinion (February/ March 1984), p. 15...

...Citizens have the right to expect that the public sector perform its functions with more dispatch, more frugality, more kindness, and more respect for individuality...

...Where private firms operate outside the reach of market competition, their conduct changes, motivated by an incentive to maximize profits, but not to minimize costs...

...In contrast, business news occupies less than 5 percent of network airtime and less than 10 percent of newspaper coverage...

...Our negative predisposition toward government reinforces our acceptance of gross disparities in income and wealth distribution...

...The public sector operates in a fishbowl, with everything that it does subject to close observation...

...A particularly disturbing corollary of our retreat from collective action is our attitude toward economic inequality and the less fortunate among us...

...There is, however, another plausible interpretation of recent trends...

...6 By contrast, corporate crime during the same era received relatively modest coverage...

...As a result, government's responsibilities encompass the most difficult and intractable of society's problems...

...This is evident even among groups one might expect to exhibit strong egalitarian tendencies...

...Experience in the United States is limited, but governmentowned automobile firms (Renault, Volkswagen), aircraft manufacturers (Airbus), oil companies (British Petroleum, SNEA), and banks (Credit Lyonnais, Westdeutsche 319 Landesbank), have successfully competed in the international marketplace for decades...

...Would private management overcome the problems caused by high minority enrollment, declining pools of qualified teachers, white flight to the suburbs, conflicting objectives over social values and educational goals, or the flatness of employee incentive structures...

...For example, the Watergate scandal dominated the news in the early 1970s...

...As dissatisfaction with the performance of government increased over the post-World War II era, the number of Americans describing themselves as liberals dropped almost in half...

...We may be just as divided over the value of particular market goods and services, but less conflict arises where individual choice can be exercised...

...Sidney Verba and Gary R. Orren, Equality in America: The View from the Top (Cambridge Univ.: Harvard Univ...

...Ideology: Where Have All The Liberals Gone...

...9 N. surprisingly, the United States spends less on social welfare programs than do virtually all the other similarly affluent nations in Western Europe...

...It is possible that we are mistaking the higher degree of complexity and controversy characteristic of nonmarket tasks with inefficiencies in government...

...80 percent felt they were treated fairly in personal encounters, compared to 42 percent who shared that view in their general evaluation...

...When asked how much of federal government spending is wasted, the median response is nearly 50 percent...

...As long as we remain captivated, however, by simplistic and stereotypical views of government performance, this outcome will seem both legitimate and irreversible...

...The predictable result is a widening imbalance between public- and privatesector consumption...

...For liberals, it undermines their resolve in government, and shifts to them the burden of proof for any new initiatives in the social sphere...

...In an era when liberals, moderates, and conservatives find little basis for common cause, criticizing government's performance is a unifying ritual...

...If the differences, however, between nonmarket and market output on the one hand, and collective and individual consumption on the other, bias our evaluation of public-sector efficiency, then it is possible that we are underinvesting in public needs and overspending on private wants...

...If, for some reason, a wide-ranging probe was undertaken, can we conceive of private firms sanctioning the release of derogatory information to the public as freely as did the Reagan administration with the Grace Commission's findings...

...11 The value of the market need not be diminished for us to recognize the peril in assuming that what works for commodity production is equally suited for other tasks...

...We also have one of the weakest labor union movements in the Western world...

...In government, to pay a top official a salary of $1,000,000 is in itself wasteful...

...In 1982, President Reagan created a presidential commission headed by corporate executive Peter Grace to probe waste in government...

...It is one thing to be sobered by the difficulty of solving social problems or providing nonmarket output...

...A routine police booking of a suspected criminal evokes little curiosity, but a case where police officers violate a prisoner's constitutional rights is of great interest...

...The reinforcement of belief in government waste and corruption is so pervasive that it frequently overrides citizens' own experiences with government agencies...

...The market sphere is also spared most of the controversy over the distribution of income and power that inflames public opinion toward government output...

...The public sector particularly suffers in comparison to the private sector, which is viewed as less wasteful, more bottom-line oriented, and more attuned to shifting consumer demands...

...Regardless of their relative merits, market goods or services that can be purchased on an individual basis, without conflict over goals, ability-to-pay, or democratic procedures, are likely to be appreciated more than collective output...

...When we pay for output collectively, we must cope with how to share the cost burden fairly...

...When we consume output together, we must consider how to satisfy the whole of society, not just individual households...

...Several studies have determined that citizens who express satisfaction with their own direct encounters with government agencies still express disapproval in their general evaluation of overall government performance...

...Liberals tend to have less faith in the market than conservatives, and are more willing to have government guarantee a certain level of health, education, and welfare, irrespective of market outcomes...

...Indeed, since greed and self-interest are viewed as conducive to business success, awareness of anti-social behavior may actually reinforce a belief in private-sector efficiency...

...Particularly in economic sectors dominated by large corporations, where managerial control is divorced from ownership, market profits may be less important as a spur to private initiative than as a yardstick of firm performance and a means by which to balance supply and demand...

...Nonetheless, the burdensome impact of a less affluent clientele on public services, and its role in fostering a negative image of government, have been largely ignored...

...There has been virtually no consideration given to the countervailing influences that undermine public support for government output, causing us to overindulge on wants that can be fulfilled through market consumption, and underspend on needs that can be satisfied only through collective consumption...

...For eighteen months, the commission's staff was given full access to internal documents detailing government operations and finances...

...The inherent divisiveness of collective consumption helps explain why citizens tend to be programmatically progovernment, but ideologically antigovernment...

...News coverage of the public sector generally accounts for 50 percent or more of all television network news and 25 percent or more of newspaper coverage...

...It might come as a surprise that the negative disposition toward government in the United States is rooted in something as mundane as a misbegotten comparison...

...Given the choice, Americans will invariably choose private hospitals over public hospitals, private housing over public housing, and private country clubs over city playgrounds...

...If our low regard for government is justified, then we are probably getting the balance of public needs and private wants that is socially desirable...

...The separation of the public sector from the market sphere is so complete that government provides less than three percent of all goods and services sold to individuals in market transactions (primarily postal services and rapid transit, which can't be operated profitably by private companies...

...The 67 percent of adult Americans who are nonsmokers need not purchase cigarettes, but the 63 percent of American households without school-age children must help finance public schools...

...The very strength of market choice is its undoing when the need is not to narrow, but to broaden our vision...

...Collective consumption burdens government with a range of obligations that do not apply to individual market consumption...

...Private companies are required to divulge only very general data about their operations...

...Congress, The Concentration of Wealth in the United States, 99th Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986...

...Where overlaps occur, public services invariably cater to less affluent households than do private services...

...Equality of influence is absent from the market sphere, but less parity is expected...

...They were never demonstrated to be symptomatic of the public sector, or related to self-enrichment like most other crimes...

...While consideration of operational efficiency is swayed by differences between nonmarket and market output, appreciation of the output delivered by the public and private sectors is skewed by differences between collective and individual consumption...

...Ramifications of these Beliefs A STRONG TRADITION OF INDIVIDUALISM continues to hold great appeal to Americans...

...For instance, a comparison of the views of leaders of the Social Democratic party in Sweden and the Democratic party in the United States reveals striking differences...

...323 However, we live in an era when the pursuit of narrow self-interest in an increasingly interdependent world appears ever more questionable, and the need to cope collectively with ecological disorders, global market competition, nonrenewable resource depletion, widening gaps between rich and poor nations, rapid technological change, and nuclear disarmament looms increasingly large...

...The commission's report, released in 1984 with over 21,000 pages of documentation, received enormous coverage in the media, despite serious questions raised over its accuracy and impartiality...

...cleaner swimming pools, but dirtier air...

...it may channel too little money into universal social programs and too much into national defense...

...74, 84...

...The sheer volume of government output, totaling more than one trillion dollars, ensures that we will be less informed or appreciative of the benefits derived from our collective purchases than of our average household consumption of $20,000 in market goods and services...

...Divisiveness of Collective Consumption THERE IS ANOTHER ASPECT OF EFFICIENCY that influences public opinion toward government...

...Alone among the rich nations of the world, the United States lacks a national health insurance program...

...With the exception of the military, no comparable effort is made to advertise the benefits of collective purchases...

...It would be convenient if most of our desires could be satisfied through autonomous individual action in the marketplace, or at home, free from the messy world of politics and collective decision making...

...Unlike market output, which must be tangible enough to be packaged and sold over the counter to consumers in individual market transactions, nonmarket output is often abstract (protection of 320 property rights), indirect (research and development subsidies), or not subject to immediate individual gratification (defense spending...

...preserving world peace in the face of a nuclear arms arsenal capable of destroying human civilization many times over...

...moderating and containing unpredictable and volatile business cycles...

...Employee theft also increased from an estimated $16 billion in 1971 to $75 billion in 1980...

...Notes 1 George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1972-1977 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1978...

...Well over one-third and often one-half of the work forces in other advanced industrialized democracies belong to labor unions, but in the United States less than one-fifth are members...

...Government is the major societal institution capable of altering marketgenerated inequalities, either directly through redistribution of income, or indirectly through rules and regulations imposed on market behavior...

...The most notable affirmation of this trend was the election of Ronald Reagan, surely the most anti-government president in the last half century...

...George Lawrence, ed...

...551-552...

...Even more startling, Swedish leaders considered a fair ratio between top and bottom earners— between top executives and dishwashers or elevator operators—to be two to one, compared with the fifteen-to-one ratio supported by American Democratic party leaders...

...The public sector operates in the absence of market exposure because the output assigned to government does not lend itself to market exchange...

...Is government too big, or are we inclined to overvalue market consumption be317 cause it is easier to fulfill individual demands than to satisfy collective wants...

...Joint Economic Committee of the U.S...

...While the private sector accommodates our diverse and fragmented demands for market consumption, government restores the whole by filling gaps, resolving conflicts, balancing competing demands, and sustaining that portion of human needs that does not reduce itself to marketable commodities...

...Public Opinion (April/May 1985), p. 35...

...Private companies remain relatively immune from scrutiny and exempt from criticism of their efficiency as long as they sustain profitability...

...There is certainly much that government has to answer for in terms of efficiency and accountability...

...Martin's Press, 1983), esp...

...Less market exposure is thought to weaken government operations relative to the private sector, by removing incentives that reduce costs and foster operating efficiency...

...Yet the pilferage, bribes, kickbacks, sales of trade secrets, and embezzlement received nowhere near the attention accorded to public-sector misdeeds.' An analagous pattern emerged with the 1986 contragate scandal...

...2 Between 1970 and 1984, the number of entering college freshmen describing themselves as liberals dropped by half as well...

...3 Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp...

...For conservatives, it renews their faith in individual initiative and the market sphere...

...The channeling of the poor and lower-middle class to public services occurs either de jure (income-based means tests used in public housing, Head Start child care, legal aid, welfare) or de facto (the inability of less affluent Americans to purchase more expensive and restricted private education, housing, and recreational facilities...

...Another 2,000 corporate executives participated in the thirtysix task forces established to investigate different areas of federal government operations...

...New York: St...

...similar results occur when labor leaders in Sweden and the United States are polled...

...19, 152, 202, and 204...

...and 72 percent of the clients thought the agency had functioned efficiently for them, compared with 30 percent who gave government offices in general good marks on prompt service.' NOT ONLY DO WE PAY MORE ATTENTION to what government does, but we tend to apply different performance criteria to public and private sector actions...

...Few would argue that companies like General Dynamics or Lockheed, whose biggest customer is the federal government, are models of efficiency...

...Watergate was a front-page story in the New York Times every day except for three during May, June, and July 1973...

...In recent years, the notion that special interest groups and self-serving bureaucrats create pressures that inflate collective expenditures has dominated the debate over public spending and regulation...

...eliminating poverty or at least reducing marketgenerated disparities in income and wealth...

...Mayer (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1969...

...10 Arnold J. Heidenheimer, Hugh Heclo, and Carolyn Teich Adams, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and America, 2nd ed...

...In 1980, on the eve of Ronald Reagan's election to his first term, this sentiment peaked with 78 percent of Americans believing that government wasted a lot of money, and only 2 percent thinking that not much was wasted...

...Refrigerators, french fries, and hair dryers are suitable for assembly-line mass production, while education, consumer regulation, and police protection are not...

...At the same time the insider trading scandal on Wall Street, one of the biggest private-sector scandals in decades, was pushed off the front page, receiving less than one-fifth the coverage of the government scandal...

...Can we imagine private companies cooperating with a group of government executives or labor union officials by providing complete access to confidential memorandums or proprietary financial data...

...Researchers at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center, in a series of evaluations of performance in government service agencies, determined that 71 322 percent of the clients reported a successful outcome in their own cases, while only 30 percent gave the government office good marks on being able to take care of problems generally...

...7 Mark Green and John F. Berry, The Challenge of Hidden Profits: Reducing Corporate Bureaucracy and Waste (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1985), p. 259...

...The negative public attitude toward government, however, derives not so much from the public sector's divergence from efficiency in general, but from its perceived departure from privatesector norms...

...Business is consistently rated low in areas such as protecting the environment, caring about customers or employees as individuals, holding down prices or profits, and honesty in advertising...

...it may fail to adequately enforce regulations because of opposition from organized interest groups...

...While market consumers can make purchases in varied amounts to reflect differences in tastes, voters must typically consume identical levels of collective goods and services...

...11 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans...

...National opinion polls capture the magnitude of public dissatisfaction with both the means and ends of government...

...By margins of greater than five to one, Americans believe that the public sector is run less efficiently than the private sector, and that government employees work less diligently than do their private counterparts...

...Accordingly, we evaluate market output on a narrower basis, reflecting only our own choices, not those of others...

...Virtually all of the thirty-five million Americans who live below the poverty line, the so-called "Other America," populate public services...

...The belief in government inefficiency is comforting because it suggests that we are better off if we do more on our own as individuals and less together as citizens...

...more videocassette sales, but fewer school textbooks...

...to play favorites, selecting one's friends or relatives for jobs, is a violation of ethical standards...

...9 Sidney Verba and Gary R. Orren, Equality In America: The View from the Top (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp...

...Thus the anomaly of an America with more racquetball clubs, but fewer public parks...

...more fast food outlets, but fewer public health dollars...

...As the institution responsible for conflict resolution, government must necessarily tolerate a greater level of politics and bureaucratic due process than the private sector...

...These outputs are favored not because they are more desirable, but because they lend themselves more easily to market provision...

...Reports of the Iranian arms deal and the channeling of money to the contras in Nicaragua reached a fever pitch in late 1986 and early 1987...

...Is government less efficient than the private sector, or are there qualities in the tasks assigned to government that make its goals more difficult to achieve...

...p. 258...

...Both sectors operate schools, hospitals, parks, mental institutions, law offices, and rental housing...

...The President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, as it was officially known, lived up to its name, with only seven of its 161 members coming from outside the ranks of business...

...To be sure, public opinion of private-sector performance is not uniformly high...

...Government has no such saving grace, as poor performance in one agency is not excused by good performance in another...

...253-256...

...This predatory image of business, however, does not necessarily damage its reputation for efficiency...

...Private firms can sell these services to customers in market transactions, while government cannot...

...it may rely too heavily on private contractors outside of its immediate control...

...Public interest extends to details of life, personality, and conduct that in private business would never be of concern outside the organization...

...Although opinion polls document wide support for many individual government programs, they also uncover deep dissatisfaction with government spending as a whole...

...325...

...Press, 1985), pp...

...120-122...

...Where government operates in an environment hostile to collective action, and susceptible to manipulation by powerful private forces, its performance is likely to be less than optimal...

...Today, the situation is largely reversed...

...15 percent of Americans have no health insurance whatsoever...

...An army training exercise is not newsworthy, but a foulup in monitoring procurement contracts is given wide circulation...

...By wide majorities, Americans also believe that government is more responsible than is business for low productivity, slow economic growth, and high inflation.' A shared perception that government is less efficient than the private sector does not mean that Americans are in complete accord on the appropriate role for government...

...Over 90 percent of the American public believes that every citizen should have an equal chance to influence government policy, but fewer than 10 percent support the notion of equality of outcome in the economic sphere.' Appreciation of collective consumption also suffers because we are less aware of how much we are getting for our money...

...A one-dimensional view of government, however, that fails to take account of the overreach of the market sphere, is likely to blame the subpar performance on an innately incompetent public sector, rather than on an unduly powerful private sector...

...It is simply unfeasible to transform national defense, criminal justice, environmental regulation, and similar government outputs into commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplace...

...educating and socializing the nation's youth...

...Although the public and private sectors typically operate in distinct spheres of the economy, there is undeniably a certain degree of overlap...

...The private sector produces computers, automobiles, fast food, and other goods and services that lend themselves to profitable market transactions...

...more second homes, but less public housing for the homeless...

...A similar paradox applies to inquiries into public and private sector waste...

...The tendency toward overindulging on wants that can be fulfilled only through market consumption, and underspending on needs that 324 can be satisfied only through collective consumption is a perversion of rational social choice...

...Reinforcement of the Stereotype THE TENDENCY TO VIEW GOVERNMENT operations more critically than private-sector production is reinforced by the disproportionate scrutiny accorded to government...

...Any litany of public dissatisfactions with government, however, reveals a blurring of the innate problems of the nonmarket sphere with perceived incompetence in public-sector performance...

...Instead of recognizing that the tasks assigned to government are unsuited for market production, we condemn government for its inability to conform to the criteria of the market sphere...

...255-56...

...Opinion Roundup," Public Opinion, March-April 1987, p. 27...

...6 Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 189...

...The political controversies that rage within the public sphere increase the likelihood that virtually all citizens will find themselves continuously dissatisfied with government, pleased with some of its actions, disgruntled by others...

...321 Lopsided coverage of public affairs is not necessarily prejudicial to government...

...We are likely, for instance, to compare the performance of a private firm, such as General Motors, in manufacturing automobiles, with that of a public agency, such as an urban public school system, in educating inner-city schoolchildren...

...Empirical studies of the public and private sectors operating within similar market or nonmarket environments produce no clear-cut pattern...

...In those instances where the public and private sectors operate under similar circumstances, the available evidence does not confirm the superiority of private enterprise...

...Rather it is considered part of a natural cleansing process in which the stronger firms survive and the weaker ones perish...

...The flaw in this logic is that it confuses the characteristics of nonmarket output with inefficiencies in government...

...and reducing racism, sexism, and other deeprooted human behaviors...

...Although demand for government services rises and falls depending on the prevailing political and economic climates, a negative view of government efficiency inhibits a nation from committing itself to collective action...

...Far more is expended to persuade the American public of the virtues of lite beer or Chicken McNuggets than of quality education or welfare programs.' Acitizen is far more likely to be dissatisfied with some portion of collectively consumed output than with market goods and services, regardless of whether he or she thinks the public sector should be expanded or contracted...

...It becomes so, however, because failure and controversy are more likely to attract attention than success or complacency...

...See: Census Bureau study for 1983, quoted in Robert Pear, "15% of Americans Found to Lack Health Coverage," the New York Times, February 18, 1985, p. A13...

...In the private sector, however, these actions can be justified by citing compelling business needs, or, alternatively, the right of an owner of private property to act as he sees fit...

...5 Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, 1980 American National Elections Study, Wave C-3 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Distributed by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research...

...The need for collective consumption, however, arises precisely because individual market choice is unavailable or ineffective for fulfilling certain human wants...

...According to conventional wisdom, a growing awareness of the limits of government action and the benefits of a less regulated market sphere led Americans to embrace policies aimed at contracting the public sphere, except for national defense, and expanding the market sphere...

...Even though the share of wealth owned by the top one-half of one percent of Americans has increased from 25 percent in 1963 to 27 percent in 1983, public discussion focuses on limiting the welfare state, not on its limitations...

...But even in 1985, after several years of rising confidence in government, 76 percent of Americans still believed that government wasted a lot of money.' The intensity of citizen disaffection with government, however, may have less to do with the level of government waste than with how much more difficult it is to satisfy collective wants than individual desires...

...169-170...

...With new revelations dominating the airwaves and front pages, President Reagan's popularity declined precipitously, falling more than twenty-three points in one month, one of the sharpest drops ever recorded...

...As citizens, we are interested not only in how much output the public and private sectors produce per level of input, but in which sector provides us with the output we most desire...

...The president's philosophy of government was neatly encapsulated by his statement, "I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' Dissatisfied with a public sector regarded as wasteful and overreaching, Americans reversed the postwar trend that allocated an increasing share of societal resources to public needs...

...4 U.S...

...There is no annual budget process that requires us to justify how much we spend on private wants...

...Even widespread failure among individual firms is not necessarily equated with private-sector inefficiency...

...In many ways, government is merely a symbol for our willingness to act collectively, and a target for all the frustrations we encounter in doing so...

...This outcome reaffirms the need to distinguish between public and private manageability...

...It is quite another to conclude that government is to blame and market solutions are available as substitutes...

...THE MARKET SPHERE AVOIDS THE CONFLICTS Of the political arena, not because the market provides each of us with exactly what we want, but because it is not expected to do so...

...The value of market goods and services is reinforced by the $88 billion spent annually by American companies to advertise their wares...

...Government may approach its objectives in a half-hearted, or ad-hoc manner...

...fancier hotels, but decaying public works...

...In the nineteenth century the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville noted that America was experiencing both faster growth and more widespread equality than Europe...

...Less willing to use government as a redistributor of income, the United States ranks second to last among the major industrialized democracies in income equality...

...Public sector performance is sometimes better, sometimes worse, but by no means innately inferior to private-sector operations...

...THE ABILITY OF THE PRIVATE SECTOR to mass produce many of its goods is a striking confirmation of how tangible and apolitical market output can be...

...Belief in the legitimacy of income inequality as a tool to spur economic growth is far more prevalent among Americans than it is among people in other nations...

...It is not just collective action through government that suffers in the United States...

...Market products can be limited in scope, isolated from other output, and evaluated by a uniform bottom line (profits), but nonmarket output tends to be less well-defined, with more open-ended goals, interdependent outcomes, and ambiguous performance criteria...

...We can't place individual orders for soldiers or clean air as we can for toilet paper or vacuum cleaners...

...We may envy someone who can afford fancier vacations, larger automobiles, or more expensive furniture, but there is no "one person, one dollar" rule that raises expectations similar to democracy's "one person, one vote...

...No comparable effort has been attempted to investigate waste in the private sector...

...But the similarity in functions masks a fundamental difference in clientele that is prejudicial to government...

...George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1978, 1979 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1979...

...The fact that poor people populate public services in numbers disproportionate to their presence in society has not gone unrecognized...

...Vegetarians can abstain from the average American consumption of 171 pounds of meat each year, but those opposed to the Reagan administration's military buildup must share in the more than $1,000 per person annual cost of America's armed forces...

...The real test of relative efficiency, however, is whether General Motors, or some other private firm, could manage the public school system more effectively...

...We look at government and we see no bottom line, no competitive pressure, no threat of bankruptcy, and no self-interest-driven motivation...

...In the absence of identical preferences, citizens will have to pay for government programs they support as well as for those they oppose, for benefits received directly and those paid out only to others...

...Nonetheless, the continuous stream of revelations and intense media coverage of Watergate gathered a momentum of its own, sharply reducing confidence in government operations...

...During the 1970s, one-quarter of the Fortune 500 companies were convicted of at least one major crime or paid civil penalties for serious misbehavior...

...The very characteristics that remove certain outputs from the market sphere complicate the delivery of public goods and services...

...Hundred Leading National Advertisers," Advertising Age, September 4, 1986...

...8 Daniel Katz, Barbara A. Gutek, Robert L. Kahn, and Eugenia Barton, Bureaucratic Encounters: A Pilot Study in the Evaluation of Government Services (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Institute for Social Research, 1975), pp...

...Roots of the Stereotype THE PUBLIC SECTOR IN THE UNITED STATES is engaged almost exclusively in providing nonmarket output...