The saga of Walter Pierce Park

Friday's Washington Post had an article about a public park not too far from my house and its sad state of neglect by government officials and overuse by everyone else. Here's what the park looks like today:

Tragedy of the commons

The short version of the article is that the park was re-sodded back in the 1990s by a private landscaping company at no cost. The parks and recreation department failed to perform any maintenance on the field or monitor its use and it fell back into disrepair. Then in 2004 the government attempted to once again rehab the park:

The agency's current interim head, Ximena Hartsock, was initially unaware of the history of what had gone wrong at Pierce; her spokesman, John Stokes, e-mailed a day later to say that the field, which was renovated by two contractors who were paid $215,620, was damaged by a sprinkler and irrigation system that "malfunctioned" and by the District's "improper maintenance."

Now the place has become a dustbowl, which has prompted officials to put up the following sign:

We're incompetent, keep out.

The article concludes by noting that currently the park is on a list of parks to be renovated, but no timetable for any work to be performed currently exists.

I would imagine that most people think parks and recreation falls under the purview of local government. It's not a terribly controversial responsibility, unlike say, health care. But even here the government performs poorly, with high cost, low quality and a lack of responsiveness the order of the day. And yes, D.C.'s government is particularly dysfunctional, but we can also see a substandard performance of the public sector versus the private sector in park maintenance elsewhere.

Government as an institution almost invariably falls short when compared to the private sector. While volumes could -- and have -- been written about the virtues of libertarian political philosophy, more succinctly it just comes down to this: given the incompentence of government and its consistently inferior performance versus the private sector, why would we want to give it any more power than is absolutely necessary? If it struggles with something as basic as park maintenance, why should we entrust it with health care?