This is true of any large organization. No government bashing required.

A large organization populated by bad employees will go out of business. Only the government and its appendages have the luxury of avoid that fate.

You will not believe how many bad employees a large organization can carry and still grow and prosper.

I mean, ever talked to an AT&T call center? Do you see them going out of business any time soon?

There was this guy I worked with on a previous job. He was simply unqualified to do his job, and displayed no interest in becoming more qualified. He did the bare minimum to survive, and very often others had to do his work for him so they can make progress in their own job. For various reasons his managers preferred to keep him even though he knew of his low performance. He was there for 3 years when I left. The organization is in no danger of dying, even though around 30% of the employees were of similar quality.

When I think of firms not dependent upon nor beneficiaries of government largesse, market manipulation, and anti-competitive barrier raising, AT&T isn't what comes to mind.

Sigh.

HP? IBM? Oracle? Verizon?

Although "market manipulation" is broad enough to include any large company at all. Same with "anti-competitive barrier rising".

So, we can say that past a certain size companies become evil bastards and have many bad employees and they survive quite well.

They are still not government though, and consumers could choose to stop using their products and they could go out of business. Except they don't.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Let me try again:

When I think of firms not dependent upon nor beneficiaries of the government's largesse, the government's market manipulation, and government's anti-competitive barrier raising, AT&T isn't what comes to mind.

And of course the firm's resistance to market forces is not binary, but rather proportional to how close the firm is to the government corpus. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more so than AT&T more so than Apple.

So I was hoping you will accept one of my other examples of companies with large numbers of bad employees that show no intention of going out of business any time soon.

The cellphone market is highly regulated, but the large computer and software manufactures don't seem to depend on government manipulations.

In my experience, it's way worse in government (although that could be because they have large unions that protect the deadwood, not just because it's government).

Not many businesses come close to the nyc dmv

I work for the federal government, and have worked for large corporations; While the bashing may not have been required, it's definitely appropriate in this scenario.

creed bratton, the character, is very real.