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Show ! AlThs iR0pOrt by SeratorOrrin Hatch The words .from a song in a famous Broadway musical "Anything you can do, I can do better;. I can do anything better than you" reflect the feelings many people in private enterprise would express ex-press to their counterparts in the federal government. In most cases I would agree with them . Yet for years we have seen the government assume functions fun-ctions that traditionally have been left to the private sector. sec-tor. Government agencies needing services ranging from printing to clean laundry laun-dry need not go to the Yellow Yel-low Pages to get a job done when they can more easily complete it within the confines con-fines of the bureaucracy. Eleven thousand tasks that could be performed by private pri-vate industry costing $19 billion, are now being done by federal employees. The assumption of those tasks by the government is nothing more than tax subsidized sub-sidized competition for private pri-vate industry. Businesses already coping with inflation and high interest rates, excessive ex-cessive regulation and limited li-mited markets now face the unpalatable irony of supporting sup-porting their own rivals; as taxpayers, they are feed- ing the hand that bites them. The return of those 11,000 functions to private hands would not only eliminate that irony, but would produce three definite advantages for America. First, the government would get the same services at reduced cost, due to an incentive largely nonexistent in federal circles; theprof-it theprof-it motive. Contract hungry private firms would trim $3 billion off the $19 billion now spent on services performed by the government. Second, private industry would benefit from the increased in-creased business generated generat-ed by the Influx of billions more into the economy, and the entire economy would be strengthened. Third, government workers work-ers and resources would be freed to concentrate on tasks that really require governmental govern-mental attention. Eliminating Eliminat-ing unnecessary functions from the job list of government govern-ment would allow it to devote de-vote itself to formulating policy, maintaining defense, enforcing laws, and the other things government does best. Senator S.I. Hayakawa has introduced a measure in this line. His resolution states: 'It is the policy of the United States to rely on competitive private industry to supply the products and services it needs whenever competitive industry prices are available." avail-able." That resolution can be illustrated il-lustrated with an example from Salt Lake City. While many federal facilities run their own food service operation, oper-ation, the lunchroom in Salt Lake's Federal Building is run by Fred Schmidt, of So. Ogden, who leases some space and runs the business for himself. The result is good food at reasonable prices, pric-es, no worry for the build-' build-' ing manager, no tax subsidized subsi-dized competition for the other eating establishments downtown, and a profitable business for Fred. That's the way it ought to be done nationwide. The advantages ad-vantages are obvious -- for Fred, his customers, his competitors, and theAmeri-can theAmeri-can taxpaver. |