Government and profit

Why I enjoy reading Wolf Richter and his experienced commenters, yet again:

Wolf discusses the Elonic order to clear out unused government office space. Wolf shows that the feds do in fact own and lease a LOT of unnecessary real estate. About 7000 buildings are vacant and many more are part vacant. Some commenters wonder if this will conflict with Elon’s OTHER order to return to the offices. Another commenter points out a fact we don’t hear in all the noise: Only 10% of federal employees are currently WFH, so the return order won’t make a big difference.

This is standard procedure for any media splash, not just Trump and Elon. When media tells us a change is dramatic, the facts always show it’s unimportant. When a change is truly significant, you can be sure media will ignore it.

This ties in with a recent item. I was puzzled because the federal postal training center (where I worked in 1978) was renting part of a student dorm on the OU campus. Seemed like the USPS should have rented a downtown OKC office building near the major USPS center there, so they could see the real facilities easily. As I read up on the history of the place, I found that the training center has now bloomed into a grand high-class resort hotel run by the Postal Service, open to any customer who can pay the price. The hotel would look atrocious to the pork-busters who want government to provide nothing but endless war and subsidies for Wall Street. But if it’s making a profit, it’s an excellent use of government resources.

One of my main themes is that government SHOULD be run like a business. It SHOULD make a real profit from its properties and workers, and the business SHOULD be available to anyone who can pay. The New Deal created several government-run businesses, and a few of them (TVA and Bonneville) are still going. Now I can add the postal training center to the list.