There’s plenty of that in the private sector, too (thinking of multiple guys earning 6 figures because they were reliable golf buddies) but in every case the problem comes down to management. For example, were those people being asked to do more? Were they getting negative reviews?
> but in every case the problem comes down to management.
This is remarkably naive and misses the big point. If a private company wants to dilute its profit by keeping on a bunch of unproductive or outright parasitic employees, then it is entitled to do so. It is competing in the market and this behaviour will be punished overtime.
There is no comparable incentive mechanism in government where they do not need to make a profit (they are funded off taxes which leads to far less end accountability to the people paying for the service) and in most instances it is explicitly illegal to start a business offering to do the same thing that governments do (as an example, I cant start up an alternative to the DMV to certify someone is fit to drive on the road).
The lack of competition and lack of market pressures allow for much greater inefficiencies to exist in government enterprises compared to private ones. This isn't to say government will inevitably be bad but any assessment of the problems of government vs private sector action need to take into account the important differences between their structures.
> If a private company wants to dilute its profit by keeping on a bunch of unproductive or outright parasitic employees, then it is entitled to do so. It is competing in the market and this behaviour will be punished overtime.
That's one option but it's far from the only one. Market pressure only works in markets where there's an efficient feedback mechanism for this kind of thing.
That doesn't work very effectively if there are barriers to switch (many ISP customers) or the only choices are very comparable in price and quality (most of the other ISP customers). They might also work to increase the difficulty of switching or rely on their ability to get customers because nobody else can claim to offer all of the things certain buyers need (tons of enterprise software of the Oracle/SAP/etc. persuasion).
Most commonly, this is a problem but it'll stay below the threshold of being fatal. A company with a really profitable core business can tolerate staggering amounts of inefficiency everywhere else as long as it doesn't get core customers to leave (e.g. Google). Value generated isn't always equal, either — many organizations with some kind of seasonal component might have to tolerate periods of higher and lower utilization if it's not trivial to rehire because they need to staff for peak demand. You can hire workers in the summer and drop them in the fall if you run a hotdog stand but if you need specialized workers or have a lot of internal business process to train them on that doesn't work so well.
My point was simply that there's a big tendency to blame workers rather than the senior level managers whose policies those workers are following. In the case of governments, you don't have the same kind of market feedback as a commercial entity but you do have public oversight to a degree most companies do not and frequently things like caps on how much money can be paid to employees, etc. which would never fly in the private sector. In all cases, you can find examples which are good or bad (e.g. compare the government of Norway to Saudi Arabia, or Apple to Comcast) so rather than observing that your apples and oranges aren't the same it's usually more interesting to ask how you could get the ones from Denmark instead of the Belarusian equivalents.
