Flight Delays and Healthcare

This article was featured in The Bulletin (Philadelphia-area newspaper) on 1/23/10. You can read the online version here, or check out the print column each week.

Nothing quite says “Christmas” like holiday travel. And nothing says “holiday travel” like a three hour delay at the Philadelphia airport. This year’s experience was uniquely telling.

My wife and I left our house hours ahead of our flight time, encountered almost no traffic, breezed through security, and made it to our gate an hour before boarding. It was far too easy. Then my wife, herself a frequent traveler,  made a grave mistake. Upon boarding the plane she said to me, “This is the easiest trip I’ve ever taken; everything’s gone so smoothly. Knock on wood.” Only there was no wood to knock on.

Sure enough, an hour later we were sitting in a 90 degree plane cabin in the middle of winter (are there really no vents on airplanes?) waiting for a small mechanical “fix.” The captain announced it would take less than 5 minutes to fix the problem—apparently the crew loading the baggage had left a cargo door open.

Of course, the five minutes became nearly two hours. We watched as countless workers drove by the plane to deliver baggage elsewhere, maintenance other planes, and direct incoming traffic. We even had visits from mechanics that weren’t “qualified” to close the door. A businessman sitting nearby dryly remarked that it wasn’t in their “union job description” to close doors. He continued saying, “In no other industry do we expect such consistently poor service, bureaucracy, and inefficiency.” “No, there’s one more,” I responded. “Government.”

The unfortunate truth of my Christmas travel story is that I have dozens more like it, as do most travelers. The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports that close to 25% of flights arrive late—where else is a 25% error rate acceptable? This, of course, does not account for mishandled baggage, poor service, and various TSA hassles.

The incompetence in the airline industry is nearly exceptional. Nearly.

Enter the federal government, society’s shining example of inefficiency and bureaucracy.  Operating outside the normal constraints and principles of private industry, the federal government has run at a loss to the tune of $12 trillion. In other words, the U.S. government has spent so feverishly and with such little regard to its expenses that it now owes over $40,000 per U.S. citizen to its creditors. General Motors would be proud.

Beneath that debt are countless examples of waste. Economist Brian Riedl of The Heritage Foundation uncovered $72 billion in lost taxpayer dollars due to government payment errors in 2008. Government auditors recently completed a five year study examining all federal programs and found that 22% (with a cost of $123 billion annually) provided little or no assistance to the populations they are supposed to serve. In November, the Associated Press reported that government agencies wasted more than $98 billion on improper tax credit and benefit distributions.  This all led Senator Tom Carper, chair of the Senate panel on federal financial management, to state, “It goes without saying that these results would be completely unacceptable in the private sector, as they should be in government, especially at a time of record deficits.” Senator Carper was just skimming the surface.

Just as “flight delay,” “lost baggage,” and “impossible-to-open bag of peanuts,” have become synonymous with “air travel,” “bureaucracy,” “red tape,” and “waste” have become synonymous with “government.” So why do we put up with such poor quality and inefficiency from both groups? Because we have to.

In many ways, the airline industry is a quasi-monopoly. Consumers traveling, for instance, from New York to California, fly close to 100% of the time, even though they expect significant delays and hassle; there is simply no other reasonable travel option.

Government, likewise, suffers the same monopolistic disease—the government has a monopoly on government. You cannot “buy” another federal government, and emigration is constrained by international law, community ties, and nationalistic impulse. Government operates in anything but a free market.

The result in both cases is the stark absence of the basic competitive forces that drive improvement and innovation. Economists Nick Abraham, Joshua Hall, and Ben VanMetre recently wrote the following about the U.S. Postal Service, the government’s “business” that lost $6 billion in 2009: “It is a quasi-monopoly, which does not allow for competitive forces to eliminate inefficiencies and determine better ways of operating. The postal service is a textbook example of a monopoly that, because of a lack of competitive pressures, faces little incentive to minimize costs and thus continues to operate at inefficient levels.” The same can be said of all government.

Aside from monopolistic factors, a portion of government’s poor quality is flatly unavoidable. A democracy will always be subject to political pressure—while businesspeople make decisions for economic purposes, politicians make decisions for political purposes. Agency appointments (made as political favors without regard to merit), special interest programs (made as political kickbacks—see the multi-billion dollar Stimulus), and expansive bureaucracy (a factor of both), are evils of democracy that will not fade. An organization without competitive pressure, subject to unprecedented institutionalized red tape, and driven by political consequence will rarely deliver an efficient, high-quality product.

That is why the best government is small government. Our founding fathers saw wisdom in limited government, power in unfettered capitalism, and liberty in personal responsibility. With its inherent inefficiencies and short-comings, we ought to keep as much of society out of government control as we can.

And yet, Democrats are now working to reconcile legislation that will place 15% of our economy under government control. The same federal government that bankrupted Social Security and ran up record deficits will now expand its bureaucracy by an estimated 150,000 employees to run health care. We had better hope their error rate is less than 25%.

-Matt Benchener is Supervisor of Newtown Township and Founder of TruPolitics.net