Thought I would add this from same news source
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000006&sid=aUrypID1yErQ&refer=home

These figures are seem strangely inverse to the "average days of vacation per year" (at least the US is inverted) figures that are going around right now... makes one wonder if there is any relationship.

Jack

Not the only factor of course, but telling, since we should all know that along with that comes a whole cart full of similar stuff from a similar mindset, high taxation, to support all the perks etc.

Not that in all, it is all bad, but that govt is always the most costly and least effective way to deliver anything.

Robin
bq. "There are downsides to the American market approach, but one real positive is that it is dynamic."

Exactly, freedon isnt utopia, but it has the merit of sucking the least, when a govt takes measures to soften the rough edges of freedom, it does so by taking away some freedom, and the burden on the economy makes the problem it intended to solve even larger.

And worse, it impedes the very dynamism that is the best cure.

What is the source for those statistics? Econopundit didn't link to it (as far as I could tell) and I don't see them mentioned in the Bloomberg article.

Help is appreciated!

OK, Sorry, I found it: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006087

"Not that in all, it is all bad, but that govt is always the most costly and least effective way to deliver anything."

Sorry to keep beating this dead horse, but if this is true, why are there no market delivered sewers, water systems, metros, city road/streets? Of course, in every real country, those goods are delivered by government because it is the least costly and most effective way.
Imagine competitive sewer systems snaking around each other under city streets which were always torn up as a new competitor tried to install a new system. There are solid practical reasons why sewer systems are delivered by government in every country which has them.
However, I do not expect blind anti-government ideology to defer to anything as mundane as practicality, given the religious undertones of anti-government theology.

Well ..... you don't really address ALL of the market opportunities. For instance, a municipality might auction off utility rights the way the Feds do with radio spectrum.

Lots of market mechanisms besides the scenario you give.

Another possibility is that a municipality might introduce efficiency indicators to benchmark its services. The top values in the scale would be set to match the best practice utilities in similar conditions. As long as it exists a scale to evaluate their perfomance, there is a preassure to improve. Those companies would never be competing for the same clients, but, in fact, they are competing against each other.

Tom Volckhausen,

In answer to your question "...why are there no market delivered sewers, water systems, metros, city road/streets," I offer the following link:

Private Water/Sewer Companies

It's an industry-sponsored site, ergo, highly suspect to any good leftist. Your assertion that government is the "least costly and most effective way" to deliver certain services is false. I have worked as a healthcare provider for almost 30 years in private and public (local and federal) healthcare settings. The consistently poor to indifferent quality of care, total lack of accountability, petty politics and systematic waste in public-sector healthcare left me so disgusted that I had to leave it.

I am not anti-government. In fact, I was once a dewy-eyed liberal like yourself who believed that government could solve many of the world's problems. Decades of real-world experience have disabused me of such naive notions. I simply do not believe that government can do a better job than markets.