And you can do all this while appearing to be as virtuous as an angel—after all, you are providing a service to people who would generally be helpless without it. They will even vote regularly to expand your service in the hope that more money will improve it.

Very few cities in America depend upon transit systems in any real sense, and each of those is characterized by tremendous density caused almost unheard-of in any 20th or 21st Century city. New York, Boston, and San Francisco come to mind. In these few cities transit can be seen as a public utility similar to roads—adding substantially to the vital transportation infrastructure necessary for any modern economy.

But for the vast majority of cities, such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, a government-run transportation system is a ridiculous government-employment scheme. Almost all the benefits of the system accrue to a small number of people, and almost all of those are the providers of the service, not the recipients.

In the real world, this system would get scrapped almost immediately, but in the loony world of liberals this is a huge success story. Understand why, and you understand the liberal mind.

In the liberal world, more government employees per dollar spent means more potential voters per tax dollar collected, because government employees are almost always liberals. They are paid to be, after all. And the more inefficient the system, the more liberals employed. And it is easy enough to get those liberals to support more spending for lousy government services, because it means more money in their pocket.

Best of all, because the service is lousy you can always convince everyone else that the system needs more money in order to provide the service better and to more people.

In the liberal world, inefficiency in government is a good thing. It means more government employees, probably unionized. It means more money going through their hands. It means more and more people under their control. What’s not to like?

Never, ever believe a liberal or moderate when they say that government services could be better if we just reformed the system; the liberal is lying, and the moderate is delusional. Government bureaucracies almost always have interests fundamentally in conflict with the people they supposedly serve. Individuals are almost always better off if they can provide for themselves or go into the competitive market to get a service, rather than depend upon government. Bureaucracies are always better off the more people who depend upon them and lack alternatives.

Getting back to transit: here in the Twin Cities we spend almost $2,500/year per daily transit rider, providing truly lousy service. What if we provided means-tested transportation vouchers to truly needy clients? I’d bet a million dollars that the system would be vastly better than what we have now.

It’ll never happen, of course. Because liberals won’t let it. They like inefficient government because it serves their needs well. That’s why we need to fight them every day and in every way we possibly can.