Which is why we need a national health care system?
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Related? “It’s Easy Money”. Nigerian scammer laughs about huge sums stolen from COVID relief program
An astonishing $36 billion has been lost to fraud in pandemic unemployment benefits, the Department of Labor reports. To put this figure in context, the entire unemployment system only paid out about $26 billion in 2019.
That’s right: Bureaucrats lost to fraud more than is usually paid out in an entire year. The $36 billion lost—and that’s just the fraud we know about—amounts to an average of roughly $1,894 lost per current unemployment beneficiary. (What would we think of a private system that lost nearly $2,000 for each customer served?)
These figures alone are horrifying, but a new bombshell interview with one of the countless international scammers getting rich off our relief efforts makes it painfully clear just how carelessly Congress is throwing around our money.
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As Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained, bureaucracy, incompetence, and waste are inherent to government administration by its very nature.
In contrast, private businesses are driven to efficiency by the profit motive. A company-wide system that is broken and bleeding money is, in short order, fixed—or if it cannot be, that company will soon be driven out of business by more efficient competitors. This influences the behavior, not only of the business’s owners, but of its hired managers, and thus all its employees.
“Within a business concern [the management of expenses] can be left without hesitation to the discretion of the responsible local manager,” Mises explained in his book Bureaucracy. “He will not spend more than necessary because it is, as it were, his money; if he wastes the concern's money, he jeopardizes the branch's profit and thereby indirectly hurts his own interests.”
Fundamentally, in private enterprise, everyone involved has skin in the game. So, while mistakes still certainly happen, there’s a strong incentive to correct them and push for as much efficiency as is possible.
In government the opposite is true.
