Musings: Social Security Reform

Some quotes from Peter Drucker's The Sickness of Government:

Some short quotes from Drucker in an earlier article, Sickness of Government:


Of all social institutions, business is the only one created for the express purpose of making and managing change. Government is a poor manager.

government is big rather than strong; that it is fat and flabby rather than powerful; that it costs a great deal but does not achieve much. . . .

The best we get from government in the welfare state is competent mediocrity. More often we do not even get that; we get incompetence such as we would not tolerate in an insurance company.

there is no performance (in government) whatever—only costs. This is true not only of the mess of the big cities, which no government—United States, British, Japanese or Russian—has been able to handle. It is true in education. It is true in transportation. And the more we expand the welfare state, the less capable of routine mediocrity does it seem to become. . . .

Every government is, by definition, a "government of paper forms." This means inevitably high cost. For "control" of the last 10 per cent of any phenomenon always costs more than control of the first 90 per cent. If control tries to account for everything, it becomes prohibitively expensive.

The system which protects government employees from political pressures, Peter F. Drucker notes, "also protects the incumbents in the agencies from the demands of performance".

To fear corruption in government is not irrational.