That's what you have to do to win them over, convince them that government isn't incompetent.
Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent? Not our current government, not governments of the past but all governments. What fundamental property of governments make them inevitably incompetent?
I ought to be able to convince you that government has a systemic weakness.
There's a controls issue.
I am going to be stealing most of these arguments and examples, from a lot of sources, and I'm not going to cite them, because this is decades of reading all kinds of things and I honestly don't sort information in my head that way. But it is easiest to identify the issue when you look at it in simple terms.
You buy a certain amount of milk per month for your household. Maybe it is zero, maybe it is one gallon. So how much milk does the country need to produce?
Well, it needs to produce (amount individual wants)x(number of individuals). But each person wants a different amount. No problem, we'll estimate that, we'll use a formula, with a distribution. And we'll come up with a range, and we'll produce some extra, cuz fuck it, we're rich like that.
But you actually prefer 1%. OK, we'll make two kinds of milk. Your friend wants 2%? No problem, 3 kinds of milk. You kid wants chocolate? OK, 6 kinds of milk. You don't want to buy it in a 1 gallon jug, you want four size options? OK 24 kinds of milk. You changed your mind when bikini season drew near and now want skim? OK, 36 kinds of milk and a seasonal variation in demand.
So, to get the right amount of milk, even if you forget details about regional variations, distributions, etc, "THE ECONOMY" has to perform an incredibly complex calculation. If you really dig into the weeds of what I described up above what you'll find is that a decision about milk needs to happen a couple of million times per day. And that's just to still it get it wrong daily.
This milk problem is not just a milk problem. It applies to literally everything. Who to marry, to have kids or not, how many, where to live, what kind of house, what job to do, car or bike, socks or sandals (or both! fuck you you don't know my life).
So government solutions fundamentally fail to recognize this systemic weakness. Or rather, the rhetoric of political debate fails to accept, with any sort of humility, this reality.
And I can say reality because of people starving in cities during the great depression not because of crop failures, but because of crops literally rotting in the fields due to poor government decisions. I can say reality because of 30-90 million (and some argue many many more) dead communists under Stalin, Lenin, and Mao in countries that can literally grow enough food to feed the entire world. These weren't failures that were the result of bad people, government simply is not up to the job of making, what amounts to, quintillions of decisions every day.
There's no computer made, no collection of computers, that can do this, except the biological entity known as the human race. And even that, billions of the best organic computers ever made, all working together to not starve to death, gets it wrong seemingly as often as not. The mechanism we use to communicate all of this information is price. And so when the government tries to make this decision it thinks it can substitute all of those quintillions of decisions made daily by just fixing the price. Any subsidy is this. Actual price fixes are this as well. And it doesn't work. I mean, it staggeringly and disastrously does not work. It kills people, is how bad it works. More people have been killed by fixing prices than by shooting guns, dropping bombs, or swinging swords. No human has ever done more damage than one that fixed a price with the power of government.
Think of it in another way.
The individual possesses everything they need to negotiate the price of everything they need. The seductive idea presents itself to the lazy brain that serves that individual that it can relax and let someone else handle that tedious task for them. This is tempting! And so lazy brain agrees. And then that other entity gets something wrong. This is of course because that will happen whenever you outsource your own decisions. But instead of recognizing that the outsourcing is to blame, lazy brain identifies others who are also doing lazy brain, and blames them. The correct solution was always to take back the decision making power and go back to negotiating for yourself. But lazy brain is lazy, and that's harder.
If your computer started telling you that it wasn't going to do the things you wanted it to do, because it had elected a computer in the next office over to do that work, you would get a new computer, and never again interact with that steaming pile of shit.
But for some reason, the human race, and I think its because of millennia of starvation, is hooked on the idea of leadership. And I will agree that a government of some kind is necessary.
But for the day-to-day, it is simply impossible for the government to be as good as the individual at governing the individual life. Regardless of how bad the individual is. Regardless of how good the government is.
And so for any given problem, the solution needs to be as local as possible.
Can I fix this myself?
Can my family and I fix this?
Can my friends and I fix this?
Can my local action committee fix this?
Can our church/school/local charity fix this?
Can our county/city fix this?
Can our state fix this?
Can our group of states fix this?
Can our country fix this?
Can our world fix this?
So if you take a step back and ask yourself honestly if certain items on the Democratic platform were even tried before just going straight to the federal level? And you find resoundingly that most of them were, and had great success, because most of them are much more easily solved locally. Upon going national, most were set back, and are less effective now than they used to be.
And more recently, you find that most just skipped the first 8 steps. Because fundraising is
hard. It is so much easier to just tax the money away. But it robs the individual being charitable of any of the positive effects of charity, and denies the recipient of that charity the opportunity to be grateful. It turns citizens helping each other into citizens forced to help each other. It turns aid into entitlement. These are real effects, and they are bad. And they are inevitable if it is government doing the thing.
There is an argument FOR government. And that's that certain shit is just not going to get done otherwise. But it is critical that everyone going to government understand that it ought to be the last resort. Nothing else has worked, we have to do this.
The history of progressiveness is one that likes to lay claim to certain things, when in reality those things were coming anyway, and progressives jumped out to force it the last 2% and claim 100% of the credit. And in so doing, provide all the justification needed for an opposition to then fight was an inevitable cultural shift. The only legitimate victories to be claimed are the ones found in the constitutional amendments. And even there, you find failures as well.
It is reactionary and understandable, as that's also the history of conservatism.
A law that says don't shoot your neighbor unless he's trying to shoot you, makes sense. The reason that is so cut and dry and should be a law is obvious. It depends not on history or party or anything. An extra tax on single people? Denying them survivor benefits? Treating them unequally under the law? That makes no sense. It depends entirely on history and party. (And I choose that as an issue as it is just not talked about at all by republicans or democrats, is clearly a thing, and so I like it as an example. Don't get bogged down by the detail though. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, you aren't paying attention).
Where you see clashes between democrat and republican, almost universally, they are arguing over things that government
shouldn't be involved in one way or the other.That's very different from "there shouldn't be a government at all." Obviously we do need a government, but that is the end of where history and party should be part of the conversation. From that point on, if you act knowing that government sucks at everything, you arrive at the constitution of the united states. Government is going to do these things at the federal level, and no others. Because individuals, if left to their own devices, are capable of governing themselves.
Please note that the above reasoning doesn't even take into account the quality of the people chosen as leaders. You could pick the absolute best, most honest, most intelligent, hardest working, people, and the systemic weakness inherent in central planning would still lead to shit outcomes.
That's the problem, portraying the failures of the system as the result of character flaws in the opposition is what elections are about, but it isn't why government doesn't actually work. The idea that the inefficiencies you see would go away if someone better was doing it, that it would all just sort of "drop out" when you balance the equation, is incredibly seductive. But there's a reason it has never worked.
And it hasn't. That's the first clue right there. You can blame the resistance in the wires for why power isn't getting to your customers, but at some point, maybe DC just wasn't the right choice. Maybe the reality underlying everything is that what you're trying to do is going about it all wrong.
And Democrats and Republicans do fundamentally agree on this. Education is so universally emphasized on both sides because of how critical that individual governing is. Republicans just look at how many people grow up to become democrats and conclude there must be something wrong with the schools, and then Democrats attack Republicans for attacking education, when the actual target was schools, because even though we're all the same, when we start making decisions that forget government sucks at everything we forget what the root cause of the problem is.
To fix the schools you don't privatize them, you de-nationalize them. You get the federal government out of it. In some places you maybe get the state government out too.
I'm going to say it again because you shouldn't dismiss it as cynicism. Regardless of who is involved, the government sucks at everything. It is the employee at your workplace that shows up late, takes a two hour lunch, takes a 15 minute break every hour, leaves early, calls in sick weekly, asks for cash advances on the next paycheck, has relatives that show up drunk, and periodically can't work because of court appearances. It's fine not to fire them, but for god sakes don't give them anything important to do. And as someone who has worked in government the past four years or so, that is the exact description of almost everyone I work with. It isn't that they are bad people, it's that government sucks at everything.
Edit: thanks to someone pointing out a mistake, I revised a portion to be (more) grammatically correct. My shame will follow me always.