Carl P. Paladino, right, in the Nirvana spring water plant in Forestport, N.Y., with the company’s chairman, Mansur Rafizadeh. Mr. Paladino, who is running for governor, emphasizes the importance of private-sector experience.

Carl P. Paladino promises to sue the federal government to overturn elements of the national health care law, to eliminate state bureaucracies, like the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, that he says are wasting taxpayer money, and to shut down New York’s government if state lawmakers fail to negotiate a budget in a timely fashion. 

In an extended interview about his goals if elected governor, Mr. Paladino did not disappoint those who have been inspired by his calls to arms against Albany.

“I’m not part of the friends-and-family club; I’m not part of the pay-to-play club; I’m not looking to get re-elected,” Mr. Paladino, the Republican nominee, said during a 90-minute discussion conducted in three cities over two days this month. “I’m not looking to go to another office and fill my campaign coffers. I don’t need any friends in Albany except the people of the state.”

But while Mr. Paladino has attracted headlines for his blunt talk and what critics say are offensive statements on social issues, like his disgust over gay pride parades, he was most enthusiastic when talking about his plans to make government more efficient, sounding more like a small-business technocrat than a right-wing ideologue.

“I’m looking at divisions and departments of agencies and authorities that are no longer necessary in the 21st century,” said Mr. Paladino, a Buffalo real estate developer. “Or are operating inefficiently, or are operating greatly for political purposes, or that need realignment.”

Mr. Paladino envisions deploying teams of engineers and public administration experts to root out duplication and fraud in state agencies. He would replace midlevel appointed officials, he said, with people who had private-sector experience. He would eliminate binding arbitration for public employees and negotiate all union contracts from scratch.

He also promises something unheard of in Albany: to reduce spending, not merely slow its growth. “The whole state of mind of Albany is, ‘My God, we can’t cut taxes, we can’t cut spending,’ ” Mr. Paladino said. “Why? Why do we have to keep spending so much money?”

During the conversation, Mr. Paladino defied stereotype in other ways as well. He wears the mantle of the Tea Party, yet he rejected the notion that he is part of a broader national movement. And he dismissed Sarah Palin, who was his party’s nominee for vice president in 2008, as a would-be “TV personality” not ready to be president.

A champion of small businesses, he said he would have no problem raising the minimum wage. Though known as a conservative, he insisted that he was “very liberal” in some respects and that he identified most closely with so-called Reagan Democrats. But money — and how to make Albany spend less of it — was most on his mind.

Mr. Paladino suggested that if lawmakers could not negotiate a budget within 60 days, he would force a government shutdown, excepting only vital services.

Lawmakers, he said, would take the blame for any resulting chaos.

“The state will shut down. And the state workers will go home. And they’re not going to get paid,” Mr. Paladino said, adding of the Legislature, “You’ll have to deal with it, fellas, because in the 60 days, you couldn’t come with a budget with me.”

Yet Mr. Paladino, who had never run for public office, also had difficulty explaining how he would push the radical change he seeks through the thicket of lobbyists and special interests that dominate Albany — or how he would convince the same Legislature he has spent months demonizing as riddled with crooks to help him.

At times during the interview, Mr. Paladino’s plans to tackle the state bureaucracy had an improvisational quality.

After saying he would slash the number of regional offices of the Department of Environmental Conservation from nine to six, Mr. Paladino was asked how he had decided on six. “Five!” he replied with exasperation. “I’m giving you an example, O.K.?”

Asked how much he would cut the state work force — whose salaries, pensions and health benefits are a major source of state spending — Mr. Paladino said he did not have a target in mind.

Mr. Paladino also had difficulty explaining where he would find the savings for his signature spending cut, a $20 billion reduction in state Medicaid spending.  Though his Web site suggests it could be found by eliminating benefits like physical therapy, prescription drugs and dental work, Mr. Paladino said he merely intended to trim such benefits. The rest, he suggested, could be achieved by tackling fraud and limiting eligibility. 

His views on how to fix government were shaped less by policy experts and white papers, Mr. Paladino said, than by his own experience as a businessman and the horror stories he had heard from fellow entrepreneurs: the grape-grower who needed nine different licenses to run a vineyard, the wire manufacturer undercut by misguided state subsidies to a foreign-owned competitor and pizzerias in Buffalo wrongly accused of cheating on their taxes.

“They’re chasing every small business into a blind alley and beating them up, for no good reason,” Mr. Paladino said. If elected, he said, he already had a plan for the state’s chief tax enforcement official, William Comiskey: “I’ll put him on a bus someplace.”

Mr. Paladino repeatedly argued that many government programs were so wasteful and inefficient that they were little more than multimillion-dollar patronage dumps.

“The New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal — what do they do?” Mr. Paladino said. “They give out the federal vouchers, O.K., for vouchers that they intertwine with local municipal housing authorities. Who works there? Suits. O.K.? They get take-home cars; they come and go as they please.”

As for the much-maligned Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Mr. Paladino said most of it should be taken over by the state’s Transportation Department to make it more accountable. He suggested that the authority’s financial shortfalls, which have forced increasingly severe cuts in services, were the result of bad management, not shortfalls in revenue.

“They lay off 3,600 people in the last few months and the operation didn’t blink,” Mr. Paladino said. “Could you imagine what else is in there?”

Like his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, Mr. Paladino said he would seek greater equity for poorer school districts. But when it came to improving New York’s schools, Mr. Paladino was most passionate about how teachers’ contracts are negotiated.

“Who is worse to negotiate a school’s contract with the union than a superintendent? We couldn’t pick a worse person,” Mr. Paladino said. “He has absolutely no expertise in negotiation. He’s got a political hack as an attorney sitting next to him who probably does real estate law and hasn’t got a clue about negotiations or labor, and here they go.

“And across the table is an expert union negotiator who negotiates contracts 365 days a year, with a battery of union lawyers who negotiate these things. And that’s why our contracts with our teachers are so far off the page.”

Mr. Paladino expressed some sentiments that were surprisingly similar to ones of people he has attacked most sharply.

Like his nemesis, Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the Assembly, he said he was uncomfortable with using gambling to raise revenue for the state. Like good-government groups, he expressed anger with Albany’s secretive approach to legislating and said earmarks should be distributed equally to lawmakers regardless of party or seniority.

Like Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Paladino said he believed local government consolidation was crucial to reducing high property tax rates. And like Mr. Cuomo, he said that governors whose experience he had studied most carefully were Hugh L. Carey, a Democrat who guided New York out of the 1970s fiscal crisis, and George E. Pataki, a Republican who pushed through a major cut in the state income tax during his first year in office.

“Pataki in his first term, I think he was a strong guy; I think Carey was a very insightful guy,” Mr. Paladino said. “He had experience somewhere in management, and he operated a good and efficient government.”

In characteristic fashion, Mr. Paladino could not resist a personal jab at his opponent, criticizing Mr. Cuomo’s father.

“I think one of the worst was Mario Cuomo,” he said. “I mean, sure he could rip your heart out and make you cry. But he couldn’t manage a government.”