Milestones
By Miles H. Barber

Competition is a wonderful thing.

We are fortunate to live at a time when we can make choices between products and services based upon competitive factors like price, quality and service.

Competition serves us well in the consumer arena and works very well in the sporting world. The success of this year’s San Francisco 49ers makes them one of the most watched sports teams in the Country.

Competition is an effective motivator in education, industry, business, politics, sports and retail. It drives individuals in business and teams to excel and do their best. This is reflected in the product or services they create or produce.

Look at the cost of computers and plasma TV’s compared to 10 years ago.

With the absence of competition, the drive for excellence is removed.

Russia did a 70 year social experiment with communism and found eventually the one size for all ideas did not work.

So it is with governments as it is with industry and commerce.

Where competition thrives, it benefits lives and where competition is dry there is no reason to try.

Companies in direct competition strive to dominate their marketplace.

In many cases, our government has put in place laws that prohibit companies from becoming monopolies.

However, oligopolies (the next thing close to monopolies) do exist in sectors like gas, electric and cable utilities. However, for every oligopoly, there is a government agency (a monopoly) assigned to oversee their pricing and service.

Within government we have little competition with the exception of department battles for larger budgets.

Another interesting thing we have with government is a major list of monopolies.

Try obtaining a real estate license at Wal-Mart or a driver’s license at Target.

If you think about it, the only legal monopolies are created by or belong to government and you must include government employees.

When it comes to competition, there is little or none when you look at public employee unions.

Even if public departments or services could be provided more competitively by outsourcing them to private business, the “laws” make it very difficult.

For example in Santa Clara every household in our city pays over $600 a year for police protection and $500 for fire protection. With 43,000 households in town (including apartments) this amounts to a lot of taxpayer funds. And, there is no competition to shop rates as you can with the cost of your homeowners insurance.

Santa Clara pays our 11 grounds keepers about $80,000 a year plus benefits. No question these jobs could be outsourced to a local landscape contractor and reduce taxpayer costs by 50% if it was legal to do so (and it may be). You could also replace the contractor at anytime if the services didn’t match up.

At this time the bargaining units of our city are arguing for more salary and benefits.

We need some competition from private enterprise to bid on their jobs.

Miles Barber can be reached at Scweekly2011@yahoo.com