OPM - Migrant Edition

The Free Press recently ran an expose of the organizations making major bank on the southern border. The goo-goo-inclined might default to a presumption that it's evil capitalists exploiting the benighted migrants and asylum-seekers, but in this case it's the people who have dedicated themselves to helping the children.

Read all about it here.

So, today, I again thump the Other People's Money drum, and remind you, dear readers, that in government everywhere everything is always about OPM.

Even when the goals are as purportedly noble as taking care of unaccompanied children who somehow ended up at America's doorstep. I won't go into the eyebrow-raising aspects of that. Instead, I'll pose a mostly rhetorical question.

Has there even been a non-profit, advocacy, or charitable organization that willfully put itself out of business by completing the work it set out to do? Or, after achieving its initial goals?

Organizations are self-perpetuating entities, no matter their structure or purpose. Individuals may come and go, but once a structure is established, it will continue to draw people with their own personal goals even if the original purpose has been fulfilled.

Usually, though, that initial purpose doesn't get fulfilled, because the incentive to actually solve the problem is subordinate to the desire to keep the movement going.

Even Mother Teresa, a canonized saint of the Catholic Church, has been accused by many, with cause, of perpetuating poverty rather than remediating it. Should we be surprised that people who've committed to helping migrant children are pocketing big salaries? Or that money is being spent in wantonly wasteful and allegedly corrupt ways? That one in-the-know person believes that,

We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.

No matter your feelings about the southern border or the migrant crisis, you should be incensed by rampant abuses of taxpayer money. You should also not be surprised in the least by it, because the incentives to be frugal and efficient are simply not there when there's a firehose of OPM, when the only competitive pressure is from other OPM consumers, and when results are mostly irrelevant.

I've encountered people who tolerate rampant waste and abuses, figuring that it's part of the cost of "doing good" and believing that it's "do inefficient good" or do nothing. I get the frustration, but what they forget or ignore is the opportunity cost of all that wasted money. That changes the equation from "do inefficient good" vs "do overall harm." Every stolen, wasted, or selfishly allocated dollar is a lost chance to do something productive in the private sector or to fund some other "do good."

Either way, it makes society as a whole poorer while enriching a select few.

That is the essence of OPM.

And, while I'm at it, that's the everywhere and always outcome of socialistic forms of governance.

If you glean nothing else from the 2000+ blog posts I've published, your understanding of how OPM drives everything in government is enough.