A Quote by Jon Meacham
It would be wonderful if the public sector were always great, or always terrible; or if the private sector were always great, or always terrible. Alas, reality is more complicated than comforting caricatures. Governments fail, and corporations fail.
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I was warned by the private sector that we would fail and would fail badly. 'The state can't run a railway,' I was told. Well, they were wrong.
The left has done a very admirably good job of demonizing the private sector, where what happens? Cheating, lying, dishonesty, destroying the planet, killing customers, starving people. And they've positioned themselves, of course, as the great compassionate last hope. They're the ones who truly care. We're not supposed to examine the results of their efforts, which are always dismal and always fail. We're supposed to examine their good intentions.
The governments are seen to be less effective than they used to be. The private sector is perceived as being so much more efficient, and so globalization implies a transfer of power to the private sector.
Living standards in both the public and private sector have to be brought down. The private sector has to sell more abroad and consume less at home. The government sector has to get closer to just spending what it can collect in taxes.
I would argue that in the cyber arena, the need for private sector partnership is higher than really anywhere else of any program we have. So, the reality is we couldn't do what we do without the private sector, and vice versa.
The populists always fail in their own terms. Let me be more specific, the protectionists always fail. They always end up delivering the sharpest fall in living standards to the people who are their biggest supporters.
The biggest difference between the private sector and public sector is in the private sector, there's a sense of urgency because you have customers and you have competitors. Whereas in government, one of your major objectives is to not make any really big mistakes.
In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.
If you run a website that doesn't have something that's terrible on it, you are not trying hard enough. You have to fail, fail, fail. You have to fail and fail miserably many times.
Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.
Private sector unionization is down to practically seven percent. Meanwhile the public sector unions have kind of sustained themselves [even] under attack, but in the last few years, there's been a sharp [increase in the] attack on public sector unions, which Barack Obama has participated in, in fact. When you freeze salaries of federal workers, that's equivalent to taxing public sector people.
I think we should, as the public sector or politicians, stop creating an illusion that it is the public sector that drives growth and jobs. It is not. It is the private sector that does it. There is no growth without entrepreneurship.
The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.
I always feel bad when people ask me questions. I always felt that I was a terrible interview because I don't have any problems with anyone, and I don't have a terrible past. Or I don't have any terrible problems to talk about that would make interesting articles.
People share a universal behavioural trait: if there are profits to be made, the effort to get that money will attract investment. This is true in the private sector, the market sector, as well as the public sector.
I can be happy in the private sector, the non-profit sector, or the public sector.
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