Sociology Response to Post #1 Your Post

SOCIOLOGY Response to Post #1 Your post illustrates one of the most complex problems in administrating government efficiently: namely, tailoring academic concepts and fiscal policies to the unique and multidimensional elements of specific communities. Your idea of incorporating local business people into community fiscal governance is attractive in principle, but it could also present various potential barriers such as the need to distinguish local business people with high-level subject-matter comprehension from those with comparatively lower levels of knowledge and understanding.

Even among fiscally sophisticated local business people, there might also be inevitable conflicts of interest among them that would have to be mediated fairly and without adding delays instead of expediting the process of local policy-making and fiscal planning. Response to Post #2 In theory, your suggestion that it is important to restrict government office and financial planning to individuals without self-interests and political motives represents a fundamentally important ideal.

However, it may be somewhat unrealistic because the individuals who typically choose to become involved in government almost always have some self-interests and personal or political agendas that motivate their actions. This is true at every level of government from local PTA associations to national-level politics. Unfortunately, it seems that relatively few people who devote their efforts and time to government do so for purely altruistic reasons and I think we have to accept that as a given.

Response to Post #3 I think your post perfectly illustrates one of the classic paradoxes of complex societies and the government and legislative processes upon which they rely. Specifically, the more complex society and its institutions and legislation becomes, the more cumbersome it becomes to administrate functions that are, in principle, not necessarily very complicated.

When it comes to matters of modern municipal contracts and government administration, there are so many areas and sub-areas involved in decision-making that the fundamental duty of due diligence makes it very hard to start excluding individuals and functions in the interest of streamlining processes.

Response to Post #4 What comes to mind when people hear "reinventing government," is referring to federal government, thinking that our country's problems stem from Washington, D.C., but in all reality it is coming from the kind of people who have won Exemplary State and Local awards (Osborne, 1993), also part of the fiscal problem is due to the recession and in part out of control spending. Osborne states in order to fix this problem the federal government needs fundamental changes, and others believe we need a complete rebuilding.

I tend to believe and lean towards Osborne (1993), in order to be effective organization of today, must be fast on their feet, lean always adjusting to constant change, be responsive to their participants, and able to improve productivity, which means organizations need to be less bureaucratic and more entrepreneurial. Response to Post #5 Your post illustrates a fundamental problem in our society: namely, the relative differences in the availability of many essential services and programs to people living in poor and rural communities.

As you point out, it is not cost-effective to send professionals out to serve small numbers of rural residents when so many more people can be served by situating program centers.