In the free market, if you do not serve your customers, you’re history. The accountability is via Profit indicator: if you are not selling something that works, your profit will suffer. Price your offering too high, people will not buy and your profit will suffer. Price is too low and be unable to recoup your costs and be ready for the future, your profits will suffer. Accountability via the Profit mechanism will and does cull the weakest. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to keep the Public Sector accountable and a recent study has shown that disdain reigns supreme when the “Governing Class” is queried about their thoughts on those they are supposed to be “serving” (emphasis mine, reformatted):
Recently, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg conducted a study of the unglamorous D.C. bureaucrat. These are the people who keep the federal government humming — the Hill staffers, the project managers and all those desk workers who vaguely describe themselves as “analysts.” As Bachner and Ginsberg argue, civil servants exercise real power over how the government operates. They write and enforce rules and regulations. They might not decide what becomes law, but they have a hand in how laws are drawn up and how laws are implemented.
This is the Administrative State of which I write often.
For all their influence, though, nearly all of these technocrats are unelected, and they spend most of their time with people who are just like them — other highly educated folk who jog conspicuously in college tees and own a collection of NPR totes. In their new book, which is part ethnography and part polemic, Bachner and Ginsberg argue that Washington’s bureaucrats have grown too dismissive of the people they are supposed to serve. Bachner and Ginsberg recently sent around an informal survey to selected members of this technocratic class, and the results, they say, were shocking.
“Many civil servants expressed utter contempt for the citizens they served”
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