Given my experience, a lot of people either don’t have the patience nor the interest in spending days on the phone trying to get customer service. So whatever micro-scale improvements you get, doesn’t translate to the macro. Whatever macro scale improvents you can get through free market, does not instantaneously translate to micro-level improvement in service.

Something similar would make a VAST improvement on the current government school system — but don’t be holding your breath for it. When they liberate people, the politicians have one less thing to “sell” — in this case, to the public employee unions.

“No Magic Bullet: The Top 10 Myths about the Benefits of Government-Run Universal Pre-School” (pdf file):

http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/educat/2006/Magic_Bullet.pdf

“There is an initiative (can’t recall if it is California wide or just in SF) to make day care available to all. Lovely sentiment. This of course requires the creation of new government organizations to manage and run these facilities. We have a 4 year old boy and 2 6 month old girls. I can only imagine how horrible and frustrating it would be to bring our children to a facility run with the same loving tenderness of a Post Office or a DMV.

Government should do only those things that only government can do.”

These government daycare proposals make my blood run cold, for exactly that reason. It would be far better for the government (if “the people” really do decide they all want to support daycare through their tax dollars, and it is not just some pandering political boondoggle) to give parents money to purchase their own chosen daycare on the free market.

Whenever the government intrudes into the marketplace by trying to provide services already being provided by private enterprise, its subsidized, non-competitive offerings (often bolstered and protected by regulations that favor its own) tend to “crowd out” (drive out of business) the smaller and more varied (not to mention better-quality) suppliers who can no longer compete. Then everyone’s worse off.

The more competition there is, the more choices you have.

“How do you go about reporting a bad experience with someone in customer service at a global company? If the imbeciles at Sprint add charges to your account, or can’t change a phone number, what recourse do you have? Not many I’m afraid.”

You can take your business elsewhere! Don’t support companies that mistreat you. In a free market, you have that right. Competition works.

But you can get your birth certificates only from a government monopoly. You cannot go elsewhere. No competition means no need for the bureaucrats to be efficient or pleasant.

2) The military is in no way similar to any other government employee. Unless other government employees fall under the UCMJ (uniform code of military justice) then you’re comparing apples with oranges.

3) Bookworm and Mr. Bookworm–Mary Matlin and James Carville–I’ve never seen them all in the same picture…

But to respond to Erp way back at No. 2 - as a male, and a white male at that, I can say that I’ve been treated rudely numerous times, so I don’t think that it’s limited to only women being treated shabily by government types.

But I also don’t believe that private industry is the panacea for rude behavior. I think many of our global companies are so out-sized that the behavior of one cog in the machine really cannot be disciplined. Though I have had pleasant experiences with customer service people at the bank, telephone company, cable company, etc. (and I always try and be nice, the idea being that if you are difficult than I know they will do everything possible to sabotage you on the problem you called with), I can say that many of my experiences with people at the cell phone provider, Dell computers, hotel chains, the grocery store, etc. are awful. These people do not care, and they do feel untouchable.

How do you go about reporting a bad experience with someone in customer service at a global company? If the imbeciles at Sprint add charges to your account, or can’t change a phone number, what recourse do you have? Not many I’m afraid.

The fact is that bureacratization of the culture and a disconnect from interpersonal communications, and frankly a decrease in civility in America all contribute to this problem whether the private sector or public.