OPM - Landscaping Edition

Many moons ago, my family hired a contractor for some interior work in our newly-purchased home. Things went as they normally did, with "conditions in the field" (the bane of us all) and changing ideas modifying things as we went along. Our satisfaction was mixed at the end of the job. So was the contractor's. After we negotiated the various changes and settled up, he made a passing comment that he was going to stick to government work going forward.

This came to mind when I saw a video of a man who provides, in Good Samaritan fashion, free yard maintenance for people who are unable to either do it themselves or pay someone. Per the report, the local government had dunned an octogenarian woman for not maintaining her yard. Not uncommon, and libertarians have a lot to say about ordinances that lead to fines (we call it "policing for profit," which tangles many in a doom loop that can result in criminal warrants and/or loss of property).

The veracity of the video turned out to be questionable and the original is gone, but the various search AIs noted that the circumstances reported aligns both existing laws and regulatory behavior. In other words, this sort of thing happens.

The landscaper was purportedly chased off by police, who (again, purportedly) informed him that the city had a sanctioned contractor to clean up messy yards - at homeowner's expense, of course - and that he could be arrested for "disruption of municipal process."

Which is a thing, intended for government meetings and the like, but apparently applicable to these circumstances.

I can fathom that an executed contract/work order might not be cancellable even if the problematic condition was remedied, but my homework on the matter noted that such city-arranged work is typically a lot more expensive than what a homeowner would expect on the open market.

Which prompts the question, "Why??"

Why would the city, in selecting a contractor to handle what could be quite a lot of such situations, not negotiate for a bulk discount, or at least get a market rate? One argument might be that there would be moral hazard in having a city contractor work more cheaply than everyone else - people could let their yards go and then pay the city's guy when they got dunned - but many of these situations are ones of hardship, not gaming the system.

The question is, of course, rhetorical. We all know the answer. It's the one lesson I hope every reader of this blog learns: When it comes to government, it's always about Other People's Money (OPM).

No one is as careful with OPM as with his own money. The people who select the contractors to fulfill this service have absolutely no incentive to be tough negotiators or to leverage the boon that is an exclusive government deal for better terms. Especially when the property owner is going to be billed (with an administrative fee going to the government coffers, I'm sure).

This sort of thing happens everywhere, but big Blue cities are most notorious for treating the poor as revenue centers, no matter all the high rhetoric about how the Left cares more about the poor than anyone else.

Our contractor-of-yore revealed the truth of this matter. Government work pays better, simply because the incentives to be efficient and frugal are weak at best. In the larger scale, those who seek to provide services the government contracts for have ample incentive to donate to their local politicians and/or retain lobbyists who will petition same for advantageous deals and sweetheart terms.

We all know this goes on, but we keep voting the same people back into office, and whenever someone says "let's make government more efficient," we get doomsaying, Washington Monument Syndrome, derision of DOGE, and Nancy Pelosi claiming there's nothing left to cut.