(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

For all those libertarians who used the Big Dig in Boston as proof that public construction projects inevitably go awry, it turns out that people working for a private firm were responsible for the leaky walls and other failures of the Big Dig.

Tell me again how what we need is less oversight of private companies and how an unregulated free market would promote fairness and justice?

Six men who worked for the Big Dig's largest concrete supplier were arrested Thursday on federal charges alleging they falsified records to hide the poor quality of concrete delivered for the $14.6 billion highway project.

The six, all current or former employees of Aggregate Industries, face a variety of charges including making false statements, mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the government, said FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz.

"My understanding is what they did was mix, commingled leftover concrete with new concrete," she said. The actions allegedly took place from 1999 to 2003.

When state police raided company offices last summer, they reported finding evidence that employees had falsified paperwork to make it appear that old or rejected concrete was fresh.

from 6 Arrested in Boston Big Dig Investigation

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I use this as proof that capitalism is flawed - the practice of trying to make the most money possible while spending as little as possible encourages just this sort of situation.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Well, resource scarcity imposes the need for us to attempt to lower the costs of ANY project. This much is true no matter what style of government, policy-making, or resource allocation we use.

But i do agree that capitalism exacerbates the problem, because the public's access to private decision-making is limited (just look at the privilege-rooted term "private" being used to refer to for-profit ventures financed by entrepreneurs), and some part of the income from any project has to be skimmed off so that it can be given to the investors.

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

"private" is a privilege-rooted term?

I guess that makes it weakly ironic that the British use the term "public school" to refer to a private school.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

"private" is a privilege-rooted term?

In the language of business, it is. I'm not saying that the public should butt into the business of each mom-and-pop small business. But i do feel that the public needs, deserves to have, more input into the decision-making for large-scale ventures. In private ventures, that decision-making is hoarded by stockholders and investors, and everyone else who is affected is shut out, and simply has to take what is handed down.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

Seems to me the problem lies with lack of oversight to make sure nobody's hands are in the cookie jar. From my perspective, it does not much matter if the government does the work, or private industy, so long as they are all kept honest.

I suspect if all people involved in this incident were executed or spent 10-20 years in the general population of a maximum secity prison, there would be far more incentive for honesty.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that you advocate execution for a lot of things.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. I do. We have run-away despicable behavior which cost billions to the people, and cause many deaths or disabilities.

There is little danger of serious consequences to doing horrible things while makine oneself rich. If the dangers of pursuing that path far outweighed the benefits, the problems would lessen.

[snakefeathers.livejournal.com]

You really want to give the state *more* power to decide who gets forcibly removed from society?

'cause I have a pretty good idea who it would be, and it's not any of the Bad Guys, its freaks like you and me.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

I am not ready to do the job myself. But this culture needs a damn good cleansing. People who kill to makle a profit need to be removed from the playing field. Yes, I realize that the government as it is not defined won't do it, but telling them they should do it is about as close to a solution as I can verbalize for now.

[daoistraver.livejournal.com]

Well, government should definitely exercise oversight on GOVERNMENT projects.

Government contractors have no incentives not to try every trick in the book, because there is little or no competitive pressure. I'm sure Halliburton, for example, has pulled lots of evil.

But these kind of situations have nothing to do with a free market.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Thing is, the government does not hire people directly to work on things like this, it gives these jobs to the lowest-bidding private company. We are told that the government does it this way because the government should not take up business that could go to private construction firms.

So there is competitive pressure, but it is a race-to-the-bottom type of competition.

Even when the government does construction directly, there is still pressure to cut costs -- that is an economic certainty. The Army Corps of Engineers turned out to be culpable in the levee failures in New Orleans.

But it seems to me that the profit motive, the need to set aside some portion of the income from an undertaking to pay the investors, provides even more pressure to cut costs than is already there.

So either way, whether the government is doing the construction or a private firm, it is in the public interest for there to be minimum construction standards and then see to it that they are applied. Without that sort of oversight, you get substandard buildings and substandard infrastructure -- as we have seen where many people die in natural disasters because they are trapped in buildings which collapse.

[dicotomygrrl.livejournal.com]

Actually honey, this directly *proves* the point because in a truly free market these ass-hats wouldn't have gotten the contract. It takes a pass the buck bureaucracy to accept shipments with out checking them and to award government contracts blindly to whomever is the most connected.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Here the problem on the government side is cronyism. Sure, we bagged the creeps who sold substandard concrete, but the second part of this (if it ever actually happens) will involve rooting out the government-side cronies who looked the other way rather than doing their job.

We have established construction and engineering codes because we know minimum standards are in the best interest of society. But the problem is getting people to keep to them.

Under even optimal circumstances there is still resource scarcity and this puts pressure on people to cut corners where they think they can get away with it. This would be true even if we had the most just legal system imaginable. (And to a large extent it is not even a bad thing.)

Add on top of this that we have a "grab everything you can" mentality, and there is strong incentive to fix the system so you can get away with more.

Truly, i don't know how to fix the problem of cronyism. It's a tough one.

[dicotomygrrl.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately it's a problem in private industry as well. (Can you say, Good ol' boys network?)
Although I will point out that any responsible libertarian is not in favor of rolling back minimum standards for public safety, or even doing away with *some* governmental/objective third party oversight. The trick is to establish over sight that is not conflicted, overburdened and/or bogged down in bureauracy.