Janet Napolitano Quotes
I'm angry that the private sector, which is supposed to be in charge of running gasoline into the Valley, doesn't have its act together to deal with a critical situation, so now the public sector has to step in.
Napolitano, Janet. Quoted in "Gov. calls emergency meeting on gas crunch." The Arizona Republic, 14 Aug. 2003, p. A1.
Hamilton, then the Treasury Secretary, had proposed the creation of a national bank with the seemingly incredible notion of having it run by private individuals and not responsive to Congress. The experience of Europe and the individual states convinced Hamilton and some others that no government, monarchy or republic, could resist the temptation to print money rather than deal with basic economic problems. If in private hands, and least to protect their wealth, the bankers would not debase the national currency. Hamilton’s view actually prevailed with some Jacksonian adjustments and interruptions along the way. Today, the Federal Reserve Banks are to a great extent private. But neither Congress nor the President can control the money supply. There are some who object for just the reason that they feel that in a democracy all the levers of government should be under the control of the representatives of the people.
the legal and regulatory system While this is generally true, the same very efficient private organziations sometimes act very efficiently against the interest of the public, or a part of the public in a discriminatory manner. There are other functions which for one reason or another no private organization chooses to take on, and we are left with government doing the best it can. And there are some areas where th cost of private service is just too high, and government assumes it for reasons of affordability. However sometimes there is a major problem created by competitive private organzaitions in such heated competition that the servie is terrible. In early America, Fire Fighting was assumed by private organzations, who would often fight with one another over who would handle the fire while entire neighborhoods burned down. The result was public fire service which is now the norm despite the fact that there might be better ervice in with a private company. America has attemted to balance this problem and tends to have done so better than most countries athough the issue is in contant debate in American politics.
This is a noteworthy quotation because it illustrates—to a slightly exaggerated degree—a major difference between the public and private sectors. However, Conrad fails to point out that when government does try and establish several competitive programs and approaches, conservatives like him are the first say that the government officials do not know what they are doing and then they object to the “duplication” and “waste.” Further, usually, when a government entity does experiment as the private sector competitive system does, it is chastised by liberals and conservatives alike for having had attempts that failed or did not succeed well. Experimenting requires a cultural tolerance for failure or imperfection. Only very courageous executive politicians like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt have been able to initiate many programs aiming at the same objective with the society keeping the best—like Social Security and rejecting the worst like the National Recovery Administration. See {631419} for his view.
Janet Ann Napolitano is an American politician, lawyer and university administrator who served as the 21st Governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009 and third United States Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013, under President Barack Obama. She was president of the University of California system from September 2013, and stepped down from that position on August 1, 2020 to join the faculty at Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. As of 2021, she remains the most recent Governor of Arizona from the Democratic Party.
