I know there are lots of people who think this country is great because of government. There are lots of others who think it’s great because of the people who live here, because of their individual initiative and a willingness to struggle and strive in search of achievement. I’ll concede there are some things government is sometimes reasonably good at. For example, many members of Congress are pretty fair at getting themselves re-elected term after term, whether they deserve it or not.

There are lots of other things, though, that government is not good at. Apparently one of them is running restaurants. As you may or may not know, there are restaurants, coffee shops, and cafeterias in the Capitol and Senate office buildings that are government-operated. The House has similar facilities, but theirs haven’t been government-run in more than 20 years. They were privatized, and between 2003 and 2007, paid $1.2 million in commissions to the House.  The federally-operated Senate eateries, by contrast, managed to lose nearly four times that much during the same time. U.S. taxpayers were forced to pick up a tab of $4.7 million. What’s more, the restaurants are expected to lose $2 million this year alone, and the Senate will have to take $250,000 from its emergency fund in July just to make payroll.

When I heard about those cash-flow problems, my first thought was that those hard-working senators were getting a bunch of great food and weren’t being charged enough for it. But, as one of our readers so succinctly put it a while back, “Wrong again, Richard.” The real reason the Senate restaurants were losing so much money is because they had lousy food and service. Nobody liked to eat there. At least, that’s what Dianne Feinstein said. She’s a senator from California, who is the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, and she’s been writing letters to other senators about it in an effort to get them to agree to privatize the Senate restaurants, like the House did 20 years ago. But, according to what I read, there were four senators that didn’t want to change because they were concerned that the employees wouldn’t have the same wages and benefits they were enjoying as government employees.

I guess I’m just not used to looking at things the way senators do. I figure if these employees were giving crummy service and they couldn’t cook well enough to attract a sufficient clientele to make the restaurant profitable, there’s no reason we should care that they might have to take a cut in pay or benefits. I can think of lots of things I’d rather do with $10 or $20 million, or however much it is that we’ve had to pay to keep those restaurants going.

As it turns out, the Senate is apparently going ahead with the privatization of their restaurants. The senators opposing the change agreed to go along when the employees were offered a contract that offered a cost-of-living increase and a “buyout” of up to $25,000 for any employee who didn’t want to work for the new, non-government operators. About half those employees are expected take the buyout.

What a surprise. 

But the thing that concerned me most about the restaurant story was that some of the senators who wanted to keep the restaurants government-operated are the same ones who have been talking a lot about government-provided health care. I mean, gee whiz, if the government loses $2 million a year running a few restaurants, it’s a little scary to consider what would happen if they got their hands on a nationwide health-care system. Just thinking about it is enough make you sick.