Patronage

Visitors to the west side of Kirtland were recently inconvenienced by road construction on Aberdeen Drive. By the time all the barricades were gone, I was totally disgusted by what I saw. The construction crew in charge of fixing Aberdeen (which was never in bad shape to begin with, at least not as bad as Wyoming Street) did an incredibly shitty job. In fact, the new Aberdeen is far bumpier than the old one.

Why does the government give contracts to incompetent contractors to fix things when they aren't broken? I suspect that it's patronage, pure and simple. The more I see of the federal government in action, the more I become a libertarian government-hater.