I shouldn’t get so angry. It isn’t healthy.
Last week, New York state summoned me to jury duty.
I went, of course. It’s the law, and my duty.
A jury may protect the innocent from government abuse. Ordinary citizens, not officials, decide if you are guilty.
But doing our patriotic duty shouldn’t mean surrendering hours of our lives to bureaucratic indifference. Serving justice is important. Sitting around doing nothing isn’t.
During my 50 years consumer reporting, I’ve watched greedy capitalists constantly make improvements and find better ways to do things. They use computers, adjust hours, reduce wait times …
If they don’t, we consumers quickly switch to competitors who will.
But government bureaucracies — courts, the DMV, the passport office — have no competitors. So they don’t try very hard.
Government is force.
My summons arrived on paper, in the mail.
Most businesses now communicate with customers instantly, by text or email. Airlines send boarding passes to our phones. Doctors text reminders. Restaurants send notifications when our table is ready.
But government sends paper.
We summoned jurors meekly arrive at the courthouse and wait. And wait.
I’m old; it’s important I hydrate. At least government provides a water cooler and a drinking fountain. Oh, damn, neither works.
We sit another hour.
Eventually, a bored clerk drones through long instructions on how fill out a form. Printed instructions would be better — a video would be much better. But this is government, and government bureaucracies have little incentive to innovate.
Finally, clerks choose 80 of us to be considered for a criminal trial. “Wait in the hall,” we’re told.
We wait.
Then they tell us, “Go across the street to another building, and wait there.”
We go.
After an hour, we’re admitted into a courtroom, where another bureaucrat tells us, “Come back Monday.”
Monday! This was the Thursday before. Imagine an airline telling 80 passengers, “Welcome to the airport. Your flight is in five days. Come back then.”
No airline would survive doing that.
But courts don’t have competition.
When court finally starts, a stenographer types away, recording what people say. Computers today transcribe speech instantly, accurately, at almost no cost. But New York taxpayers still pay someone to type every word.
Amazon experiments with faster delivery. Supermarkets install self-checkout machines. Banks let us deposit checks just by photographing them with our phones.
Capitalism protects your time while bureaucrats waste it.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman explained why by pointing out there are four ways to spend money:
1. Spend your money on yourself. Then you’re very careful about both cost and quality.
2. Spend your own money on someone else. You’re careful about the cost, but don’t care as much about the quality.
3. Spend someone else’s money on yourself. You care less about cost, but still care about quality.
4. Spend someone else’s money on someone else. You don’t care about cost OR quality.
That’s what government does.
Some court workers work hard, and many want to help people. But they’re stuck in a system where saving people’s time brings them no rewards.
In my case, 80 prospective jurors sat around for at least six hours, just waiting — that’s 12 40-hour work weeks lost. Some had to hire babysitters, reschedule doctor’s appointments, tell their bosses they’ll try to make up the work at night. Some lost income. Some missed opportunities.
For just one case. Multiply that by thousands of cases: countless hours of human progress vanish.
Why not stagger arrival times? Let jurors wait at home until needed? Use text messages to call people in?
Because innovation takes effort. So courts don’t bother.
They act as if wasting our time is free. It’s not.
Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash