The incredible efficiency of government

This rather strikes home to us:

The Department of Homeland Security granted citizenship to hundreds of people who had previously been ordered deported or removed under different names because of flaws in keeping fingerprint records, according to a report released Monday.

The report from the department’s Office of Inspector General found that nearly 900 individuals were granted citizenship because neither the agency nor the F.B.I. databases contained all of the fingerprint records of people who had previously been ordered to be deported.

Nearly 150,000 older fingerprint records were not digitized or simply were not included in the Department of Homeland Security’s databases when they were being developed, the report said. In other cases, fingerprints that were taken by immigration officials during the deportation process were not forwarded to the F.B.I.

The reason for our specific interest is that one of us, in an earlier working life, delivered the source code of the KGB's fingerprint system to the people developing that FBI one. Entirely legally we hasten to add.

But the more general point is that yes, there are things that markets don't solve. What some call market failures although they are more often simply the absence of markets. 

However, don't ever get to thinking that there's no such thing as government failure.