My brother use to work for government lab. They developed some kind of
communications technology that was then to be commercialized by one of the
big defense companies. DOD instituted a new program allowing the research
labs to bid against the defense companies to do the actualy production. My
brother's unit successfully bid and got the job. This is when the problems
started. The technology was a small piece of a larger unit produced by the
defense company. The company began a campaign of villification against the
government unit (through Congressional and Pentagon contacts) and also
stone-walled on any collaboration that was crucial to make the products work
together. They were also many months behind schedule in doing there part of
the job while my brother's unit was on schedule and below cost.
I see similar things in my area of health research; e.g. our most efficient
activities are in-house government production, next is contracting-out
where we have direct over-sight, next is cooperative agreements where we
play a partnership role with grant-funded research, last is unrestricted
grant-funded research. The latter is 80% of the NIH activities because it
is claimed that this is the best way to get innovative science done.
-Original Message-
From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 11:17 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:20588] Re: Re: Re: Re: Stupid profit rate question
I was not advocating contracting out. I only mentioned it because Max
suggested difficulties of running a production unit.
On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 10:45:32PM -0500, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
12/11/01 8:43:48 PM, William S. Lear
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Tuesday, December 11, 2001 at 18:04:18 (-
0500) Max Sawicky writes:
The Gov would have to organize a competitive
bidding system, . . .
Why have bidding? Why not just set up a public
company that hires
staff to run things. The board would be publicly
accountable.
mbs: fine but that's a different animal -- a public
enterprise, the same as nationalization. Perelman
was talking about contracting out.
Perhaps simply owning the intellectual property
of the company and
having companies freely use it to produce things
(with strings, of
course) would be the best. No need for
contracts, competitive bids.
mbs: the intellectual prop is most appropriate for
public ownership. the commodity-type
manufacture lends itself to contracting,
though even so you need a fairly sophisticated
arrangement to get the best deal. All the fuss
about the vacinnation contracts indicates some of
the sort of problems that can come up. Gov wants
the cheapest price, but in a decreasing cost
context this favors the big boys. Little boys
complain, others point out using a sole source
has other risks, thin market means few bidders
and questions about whether the lowest costs
are attained, political interference, etc. etc.
play unless you pay us handsome profits? This
is where a public
company (really, industry) would come in handy.
mbs: agreed. even pro-privatization types of the
more sophisticated sort say the Gov should always
reserve part of production to a public entity that
can be ramped up if the contractors screw up.
problem here is in a perceived emergency there
isn't time to start up a new govt enterprise,
especially in an era when ideology says if you
can find it in the Yellow Pages, you don't need
public employees and agencies. I'm not
exaggerating. This is literally a test used in
Washington to evaluate the potential for
privatization. Talk about the Stone Age.
mbs
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
