I thought, hooray! Finally the nanny government is going to stop paying people full time salaries to board buses and check peoples tickets all day. Not only does it cost tax payer money, it also wastes everybody's time, even when they don't fine anybody to make up for the cost of their salaries. It's especially mondo-retardo because competitors to the government do run city buses at half the cost to passengers (without the "controllers"): obviously the bureaucracy is where half the ticket price goes.
No such luck: controllers boarded the bus a few stops down and I asked one of them, "So your job here will be done July 15th, or what?"
"I don't know, depends on if all the changes get approved. Of course, some of us will get to stay no matter what," he said with the certainly only civil servants exude.
This reminded me of an incident while I was at college. Boston was spending millions of dollars cleaning the streets with mechanical street sweepers that weren't effective at all. Their solution? Cut the budget in half...but still spend millions of dollars on the same ineffective measures. I remember very well how furious Darius was that they weren't cutting the program entirely.
But that's how government bureaucracy works, isn't it? Just as teachers in Lithuania rarely fail students because it's so much more paperwork than a D- is, there might even be a hearing too, you might have to explain yourself, oh no! Sarunas doesn't agree that the example parallels other sectors of government run economy, but I remember, too, a story my father told me about his days in the public sector: the city he worked in had a 100% employment policy, so for instance, if at any point there were no new roads that needed paving, the city would pave some new roads anyway, ones that didn't need paving, because they couldn't possibly lay anybody off, if I remember correctly...
On other evils of bureaucratic government, here's a very depressing article my father posted yesterday: No More Eggs by the Dozen: EU Micromanages British Sales, by DanaLoesch.
