Author Topic: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?  (Read 9588 times)

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« on: December 01, 2016, 09:38:24 AM »
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.
« Last Edit: December 09, 2016, 09:08:57 AM by TheOldestYoungMan »

DoubleDown

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 2075
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #1 on: December 01, 2016, 10:35:23 AM »
I don't agree with your premise that government sucks at everything, that all government workers are lazy slobs, that individuals do it better on their own, etc. I'm also certain I can't convince you otherwise. For others who might be swayed one way or the other, I can say I've witnessed the government doing some amazing things.

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #2 on: December 01, 2016, 10:47:34 AM »
The government is better than private industry at doing some things . . . like environmental protection.  Industry benefits in certain ways from the basic motive - profits.  The problem is, not all problems return enough profit to get good response from industry before they become disasters.

While I'd never argue that the government is perfect, it serves a fundamental purpose.  There are different viewpoints regarding the best role of government and industry and the validity of them is a matter of regular debate . . . but arguments like "the government sucks at everything" are unsupportable and just hurt your cause.

Chris22

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 3770
  • Location: Chicago NW Suburbs
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #3 on: December 01, 2016, 10:52:43 AM »
The government is better than private industry at doing some things . . . like environmental protection.

I'd argue that's not necessarily true.  The government has a tendency to not know about "good enough" or "cost/benefit analysis". 

Completely made up, let's say you can make a powerplant 99% clean with a filter that costs, I dunno, $10k a year per exhaust stack.  Then there is another filter or process that makes the same plant 99.5% clean, but costs $1M to implement.

I don't trust the government to stop at 99% and not chase that extra .5%, cost be damned.

Lagom

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1258
  • Age: 40
  • Location: SF Bay Area
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #4 on: December 01, 2016, 11:00:16 AM »
The government is better than private industry at doing some things . . . like environmental protection.  Industry benefits in certain ways from the basic motive - profits.  The problem is, not all problems return enough profit to get good response from industry before they become disasters.

While I'd never argue that the government is perfect, it serves a fundamental purpose.  There are different viewpoints regarding the best role of government and industry and the validity of them is a matter of regular debate . . . but arguments like "the government sucks at everything" are unsupportable and just hurt your cause.

Agreed. The more open-minded libertarians I know all admit that climate change, for example, is one of the few things that is problematic to address without involving the government. As to Chris's point, you are assuming the only way the government might approach climate change is through strict regulations. There are, in fact, less aggressive options that are more sensitive to economic impact vis a vis corporate profits. But those still require government mandates. Private industry has no incentive to do anything whatsoever on its own, certainly not on the scale necessary to make a global impact. 

deadlymonkey

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 400
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #5 on: December 01, 2016, 11:02:35 AM »
The government is better than private industry at doing some things . . . like environmental protection.

I'd argue that's not necessarily true.  The government has a tendency to not know about "good enough" or "cost/benefit analysis". 

Completely made up, let's say you can make a powerplant 99% clean with a filter that costs, I dunno, $10k a year per exhaust stack.  Then there is another filter or process that makes the same plant 99.5% clean, but costs $1M to implement.

I don't trust the government to stop at 99% and not chase that extra .5%, cost be damned.

And I don't trust industry to not go ahead and say, lets ditch the 10k per year solution and make our share price rise 25 cents by cutting costs.  After all, the pollution likely won't affect us for awhile and maybe by then there will be a more cost effective solution......It's not like industry has been doing that since its formation in the absence of government intervention.

shenlong55

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 528
  • Age: 41
  • Location: Kentucky
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #6 on: December 01, 2016, 11:04:55 AM »
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 me and my family fix this?

Can me and my friends fix this?

Can me and 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.

I'm trying to understand your position better, can you name a current or proposed policy that would be analogous to your milk example?  Also, can you explain how subsidies are price fixing?

One suggestion I would make to you and other small government conservatives would be to get your local and state governments online.  I would love to be more involved in local politics.  But since I actually have a life that I need to attend to I only have a limited amount of time to devote to politics.  The fact that it's much easier to find information and get involved in national politics probably does make me lean more towards national solutions.

Cathy

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1044
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #7 on: December 01, 2016, 11:12:08 AM »
The more open-minded libertarians I know ...

I would suggest, and have suggested in the past, that libertarianism as a concept is almost synonymous with, or at least implies, "open-mindedness". So it is not surprising to me that the self-identified libertarians you know are open-minded.


The government is better than private industry at doing some things . . . like environmental protection.

An argument can be made that a lot of environmental problems actually stem from state power in the first place. For example, excessive personal automobile use is generally said to be a significant minority contributor to global warning, and it seems, as I pointed out the other day, at least debateable that it was state intervention in society that brought us to this state of affairs. I also wonder to what extent the system of state-created economic incentives (such as the military-industrial complex) is the proximate cause of some percentage of emissions.

Your line of argument is in need of further investigation rather than bald conclusions.

Lagom

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1258
  • Age: 40
  • Location: SF Bay Area
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #8 on: December 01, 2016, 11:16:52 AM »
The more open-minded libertarians I know ...

I would suggest, and have suggested in the past, that libertarianism as a concept is almost synonymous with, or at least implies, "open-mindedness". So it is not surprising to me that the self-identified libertarians you know are open-minded.

True libertarians should be open-minded almost by definition. But the party/movement/whatever is rife with individuals who like to co-opt the anti-government, pro-liberty message to validate various extreme views. Lots of white supremacists call themselves libertarian, for example. Many "libertarians" similarly support xenophobic foreign policy which makes zero sense because those policies inherently require a strong federal government.

But this is not the fault of libertarianism per se, just a perpetual problem the more principled among them have to deal with that is constantly giving the movement a bad name.

Lagom

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1258
  • Age: 40
  • Location: SF Bay Area
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #9 on: December 01, 2016, 11:19:09 AM »
An argument can be made that a lot of environmental problems actually stem from state power in the first place. For example, excessive personal automobile use is generally said to be a significant minority contributor to global warning, and it seems, as I pointed out the other day, at least debateable that it was state intervention in society that brought us to this state of affairs. I also wonder to what extent the system of state-created economic incentives (such as the military-industrial complex) is the proximate cause of some percentage of emissions.

Your line of argument is in need of further investigation rather than bald conclusions.

Whether or not environmental problems stem from state power is independent of whether or not the state is the best vehicle for solving those problems.

Cathy

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1044
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #10 on: December 01, 2016, 11:23:18 AM »
Whether or not environmental problems stem from state power is independent of whether or not the state is the best vehicle for solving those problems.

It's obviously not "independent" because it may be that curtailing the power of the state has the effect of solving, or contributing to solving, those problems, by changing the scheme of economic (and other) incentives. Emphasis on "may". As I said in my earlier post, this issue is in need of careful investigation and more developed arguments than I have time to compose at the moment.
« Last Edit: December 01, 2016, 11:29:51 AM by Cathy »

Lagom

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1258
  • Age: 40
  • Location: SF Bay Area
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #11 on: December 01, 2016, 11:29:44 AM »
Whether or not environmental problems stem from state power is independent of whether or not the state is the best vehicle for solving those problems.

It's obviously not "independent" because it may be that curtailing the power of the state has the effect of solving, or contributing to solving, those problems, by changing the scheme of economic (and other) incentives. Emphasis on "may". As I said in my earlier post, this issue is in need of careful investigation and more developed arguments than I have time to compose at the moment.

Sure, curtailing the power of the state to do things that harm the environment, and empowering the state to do things that help the environment. Doesn't change the fact that acting through the state is the most efficacious means to address the problem.

Edit - Note, to be clear, I am not saying the state has done a particularly good job so far on the issue.
« Last Edit: December 01, 2016, 11:34:12 AM by Lagom »

golden1

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1541
  • Location: MA
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #12 on: December 01, 2016, 11:35:49 AM »
This whole arguement falls apart at the beginning because you don't provide a basic definition of government that makes sense:

What do you define as "the government"?  People tend to talk about it as a single nebulous entity with a single agenda and purpose, which is not the case.  Also 'the government" isn't a static thing - it changes over time, and different systems of government have different priorities.  Our U.S.  system of government is based more on preserving individual liberty than say China, where the collective benefit is more heavily weighted. 

Let's look at this from a macro perspective, anthropologically.  Humans, as far as we can tell, began in small bands and tribes of maybe 50-100 people.  That got us to a certain point.  Then some bands decided to take a person out of the workforce and give them a specialized leadership job, say a "chief" or a "boss".   It probably seemed weird and unfair at the time, but it worked.  These societies tended to do better than less organized ones as evidenced by improved survival rates and the fact that they have taken over the planet.  This process of increased bureaucracy and specialization continued throughout human history to tribes, bands, chiefdoms, then to city states.  If systems with less and local government worked better, that would have been proven out already by history, because that is how humans started.  Instead, governments and bureaucracies have only grown more complex and in turn we have become more and more successful as a species.  It gives us an evolutionary advantage, at least so far.  If local governments were better, that is what would have propelled us to 7 billion plus people.  Instead, the reverse seems to be true.  Governments with huge bureaucracies exist now and people are living better lives than they ever have historically. 

Now all that being said, just because something has always trended one way doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best way going forward.  Perhaps, with the communication innovations we have, combined with the population densities we now live in, retreating to more local, specialized governments is possible in a way that it wasn't before.  I don't know. 

TexasRunner

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 926
  • Age: 32
  • Location: Somewhere in Tejas
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #13 on: December 01, 2016, 11:56:43 AM »
I'm trying to understand your position better, can you name a current or proposed policy that would be analogous to your milk example?  Also, can you explain how subsidies are price fixing?

One suggestion I would make to you and other small government conservatives would be to get your local and state governments online.  I would love to be more involved in local politics.  But since I actually have a life that I need to attend to I only have a limited amount of time to devote to politics.  The fact that it's much easier to find information and get involved in national politics probably does make me lean more towards national solutions.

I'll throw something out there that may be of consideration-  the use and injection of ethanol in fuel. 

If the markets decided whether ethanol-mixed-gasoline would be an appropriate solution to high volume, it would come down to price.  If oil went up to 5.00$ a gallon across the board, ethanol would start selling well at 4.00$ per gallon.  As is, we only have E-85 vehicles for the last 10-15 year models and everyone else is screwed.  The forcing of ethanol mixture in gasoline was a forced decision that did not help our country but helped two private interest groups, farmers who grow corn and big oil.

Quote
The use of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline proved to be
neither a sustainable nor an environmentally friendly option,
considering ecological footprint values, and both net energy
and CO2 offset considerations seemed relatively unimportant
compared to the ecological footprint. As revealed by the ecological
footprint approach, the direct and indirect environmental
impacts of growing, harvesting, and converting
biomass to ethanol far exceed any value in developing this alternative
energy resource on a large scale.
Ethanol as Fuel: Energy, Carbon Dioxide Balances, and Ecological Footprint
Marcelo E. Dias De Oliveira1", Burton E. Vaughan2" and Edward J. Rykiel Jr.3
http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/7/593.full.pdf+html

(Other evidence:  Engines have to work harder via higher compression, releases higher CO2 especially when slowing down and makes diesel more locally dangerous (like in LA / similar situations) though possibly less globally dangerous)

Farmers:  Ethanol subsidies depended largely on the passing of corn subsidies.  This is an example of the price fixing I believe TheOldestYoungMan was referring too.  Relevant to this discussion, Al Gore admitted there was political motive in the push for ethanol (proof 1, proof 2, and proof 3) and there is fairly wide consensus that it has a negligible or negative effect on emissions.  It never should have been pushed through the way it did.

Big Oil:  This one is simply math...  Say 1 gallon of gas costs 1.50$ per gallon.  Say we add 10% ethanol that makes the average on-the-road vehicle 10% less effective (conservatively).  Now big oil will sell 1.11 gallons with ethanol for every 1.00 gallon they sold without ethanol.  Immediate 10% increase in sales and the cost of adding the ethanol was burdened by the government.  Not good policy for America as this means less money in the consumer's pocket, 10% more miles driven by gas delivery trucks, 10% more demand on refineries, 10% more demand in times of high-risk events (like an OPEC shutdown as an example), etc, etc.  At that 1.50$ per gallon price, it now costs 1.65$ to drive the same distance the ethanol-free gallon provided.  Very bad idea all around...

Pretend ethanol wasn't pushed...  What if that political capital was directed towards solar (early in solar's mass-production life)?  What if it was used towards sponsoring electric battery research?  Could we have gotten (or been on the path to get) off Big Oil's nipple a little sooner?  Your guess is as good as mine but this serves as a direct example of something not constitutionally permitted that should have remained in the hands of the states (if their respective constitutions permitted it) and shouldn't even be on the federal table.

We can argue about the general welfare clause all day long but I highly doubt corn subsidies should fall under that category.



Edits:  added more evidence and fixed a broken link.
« Last Edit: December 01, 2016, 12:08:27 PM by PriestTheRunner »

waltworks

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 5653
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #14 on: December 01, 2016, 12:19:43 PM »
Well, how do you explain the fact that societies with *some form* of centralized government have outcompeted those that do not, and are now pretty much universal worldwide?

Tragedy of the commons/freerider type problems (even among libertarians national defense, police/courts, and to some extent infrastructure to allow trade to be conducted are recognized as requiring centralized authority of some kind) are the obvious reason. Without some kind of authority to organize and prevent freeriding, societies just fall apart in critical ways.

So you need some government, that's not really in debate. How much is the question.

-W

TexasRunner

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 926
  • Age: 32
  • Location: Somewhere in Tejas
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #15 on: December 01, 2016, 01:01:27 PM »
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.

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.

It's fine not to fire them, but for god sakes don't give them anything important to do. 

Well, how do you explain the fact that societies with *some form* of centralized government have outcompeted those that do not, and are now pretty much universal worldwide?

Tragedy of the commons/freerider type problems (even among libertarians national defense, police/courts, and to some extent infrastructure to allow trade to be conducted are recognized as requiring centralized authority of some kind) are the obvious reason. Without some kind of authority to organize and prevent freeriding, societies just fall apart in critical ways.

So you need some government, that's not really in debate. How much is the question.

-W

Can you define your point (I am probably just missing it)?  It seems to me that some form of government being necessary is a presupposition to this thread.  Maybe I'm just missing something.

golden1

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1541
  • Location: MA
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #16 on: December 01, 2016, 01:28:35 PM »
Government has only increased in complexity and size with increasing population density throughout history, and to humanity's benefit overall.  In fact, there is an arguement that a lot of the problems with the US government is that it isn't big enough and can't properly represent us at our current size, so let's increase the House of Representatives to match a specific ratio of population to elected official.  It would also help people develop a better trust of the government if there was a representative that they saw regularly, which someone would have more time to do if they served less constituants.  Perhaps your problem isn't that government is too big and intrusive, maybe the problem is that it is too small, and the broad brush solutions we come up with to solve problems are too general. 

I guess "local" might not necessarily mean "smaller" in a sense so I might be making a generalization that this is what you mean. 

Another problem is that if one institution can't solve problems effectively, another one tends to pop up in it's place, and it might have another agenda besides helping the public.  Theocracy, technocracy, corpocracy, plutocracy etc....  These tend to work really well for a favored group, but then disregard the rights of other groups in that society leading to instability and possibly violence. 

This is why for the purposes of the discussion, "government" needs to be better defined.  I tend to see it as a part of society dedicated to serving the needs and wants of its citizens without answering to anyone but the citizens of that society.  That obviously is not what we have entirely in the US right now, but it ought to be the ideal that we aspire to.  Even if it doesn't seem effective in solving specific problems, just the very idea that this independent body exists lends stability to a society with different viewpoints because people feel valued and heard.  It is a nice fantasy that we just want government to "work", but there is a symbolic and emotional component to it that is usually underappreciated. 

Private arrangements between groups of citizens that don't answer to a government can be extremely efficient and effective in solving specific problems, but the problem is that they might not see (or want to see) the entire picture, or they might simply decide to disregard the needs of other citizens in the same society.  Again, this creates instability, which means things get LESS efficient in the long run. 


shenlong55

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 528
  • Age: 41
  • Location: Kentucky
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #17 on: December 01, 2016, 01:37:48 PM »
I'll throw something out there that may be of consideration-  the use and injection of ethanol in fuel. 

If the markets decided whether ethanol-mixed-gasoline would be an appropriate solution to high volume, it would come down to price.  If oil went up to 5.00$ a gallon across the board, ethanol would start selling well at 4.00$ per gallon.  As is, we only have E-85 vehicles for the last 10-15 year models and everyone else is screwed.  The forcing of ethanol mixture in gasoline was a forced decision that did not help our country but helped two private interest groups, farmers who grow corn and big oil.

Quote
The use of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline proved to be
neither a sustainable nor an environmentally friendly option,
considering ecological footprint values, and both net energy
and CO2 offset considerations seemed relatively unimportant
compared to the ecological footprint. As revealed by the ecological
footprint approach, the direct and indirect environmental
impacts of growing, harvesting, and converting
biomass to ethanol far exceed any value in developing this alternative
energy resource on a large scale.
Ethanol as Fuel: Energy, Carbon Dioxide Balances, and Ecological Footprint
Marcelo E. Dias De Oliveira1", Burton E. Vaughan2" and Edward J. Rykiel Jr.3
http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/7/593.full.pdf+html

(Other evidence:  Engines have to work harder via higher compression, releases higher CO2 especially when slowing down and makes diesel more locally dangerous (like in LA / similar situations) though possibly less globally dangerous)

Farmers:  Ethanol subsidies depended largely on the passing of corn subsidies.  This is an example of the price fixing I believe TheOldestYoungMan was referring too.  Relevant to this discussion, Al Gore admitted there was political motive in the push for ethanol (proof 1, proof 2, and proof 3) and there is fairly wide consensus that it has a negligible or negative effect on emissions.  It never should have been pushed through the way it did.

Big Oil:  This one is simply math...  Say 1 gallon of gas costs 1.50$ per gallon.  Say we add 10% ethanol that makes the average on-the-road vehicle 10% less effective (conservatively).  Now big oil will sell 1.11 gallons with ethanol for every 1.00 gallon they sold without ethanol.  Immediate 10% increase in sales and the cost of adding the ethanol was burdened by the government.  Not good policy for America as this means less money in the consumer's pocket, 10% more miles driven by gas delivery trucks, 10% more demand on refineries, 10% more demand in times of high-risk events (like an OPEC shutdown as an example), etc, etc.  At that 1.50$ per gallon price, it now costs 1.65$ to drive the same distance the ethanol-free gallon provided.  Very bad idea all around...

Pretend ethanol wasn't pushed...  What if that political capital was directed towards solar (early in solar's mass-production life)?  What if it was used towards sponsoring electric battery research?  Could we have gotten (or been on the path to get) off Big Oil's nipple a little sooner?  Your guess is as good as mine but this serves as a direct example of something not constitutionally permitted that should have remained in the hands of the states (if their respective constitutions permitted it) and shouldn't even be on the federal table.

We can argue about the general welfare clause all day long but I highly doubt corn subsidies should fall under that category.



Edits:  added more evidence and fixed a broken link.

I think environmental issues are inherently interstate and therefore should be under federal jurisdiction.  I'm open to being proven wrong though.  I'm just not sure how you could argue that the effects of pollution in one state are limited to that state alone, especially with regards to cities near state borders.  Or are you actually disagreeing with the idea that issues that have impacts that cross state borders should be handled by the federal government?

I guess my real point is that the policy that you describe isn't a bad policy because the government enacted it.  It's a bad policy for a variety of reasons, but if a private company had done the same thing it would be just as bad a policy.  Is your argument that this is the only possible policy that a government could have proposed to address this particular situation?

RangerOne

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 714
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #18 on: December 01, 2016, 01:55:33 PM »
A better blanket statement may not be that the government is bad at everything. But rather that government is bad at the things the free market is best at. Which basically involves the complex optimizations that result from a healthy free market allowing supply and demand to run its course.

Government can be a great tool to handle defense, bolster science that has cultural and intrinsic value but is potential unprofitable in the short term, ensure a certain standard of public health and education to maintain a strong, educated, and healthy workforce and army.

The last bit is clearly more complicated because education and health both are complex systems that have aspects which are better handled by a free market, while obviously the country at large also benefits from ensuring that even the poorest citizen is in good health and receives a basic standard of education.

DoubleDown

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 2075
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #19 on: December 01, 2016, 02:53:34 PM »
The government is better than private industry at doing some things . . . like environmental protection.

I'd argue that's not necessarily true.  The government has a tendency to not know about "good enough" or "cost/benefit analysis". 

Completely made up, let's say you can make a powerplant 99% clean with a filter that costs, I dunno, $10k a year per exhaust stack.  Then there is another filter or process that makes the same plant 99.5% clean, but costs $1M to implement.

I don't trust the government to stop at 99% and not chase that extra .5%, cost be damned.

Except federal government purchasing/spending (in the USA) doesn't work that way at all;  it is the exact opposite, almost to a detriment as pound-foolishness. I don't recall the exact term -- something like "best value proposition" or similar -- but the premise is that the government MUST choose the proposal that meets the MINIMUM criteria at the lowest cost. If another proposal offers more value but costs even one dollar more, it is to be rejected in favor of the less expensive proposal that meets the minimum criteria. This requirement is codified in the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) as a means to curb excessive spending by the federal government, and it's been around a long time.

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #20 on: December 01, 2016, 02:54:34 PM »
A better blanket statement may not be that the government is bad at everything. But rather that government is bad at the things the free market is best at. Which basically involves the complex optimizations that result from a healthy free market allowing supply and demand to run its course.

Government can be a great tool to handle defense, bolster science that has cultural and intrinsic value but is potential unprofitable in the short term, ensure a certain standard of public health and education to maintain a strong, educated, and healthy workforce and army.

The last bit is clearly more complicated because education and health both are complex systems that have aspects which are better handled by a free market, while obviously the country at large also benefits from ensuring that even the poorest citizen is in good health and receives a basic standard of education.

I think that you're a little off base in arguing that capitalism is better at handling complexity, and in arguing that issues like defense and 'bolstering science' are not complex.

Capitalism works because of profit motive.  It is efficient because it is self-optimizing (optimizing for profit).  Complexity doesn't factor into it.  If there's sufficient profit motive for something, capitalism will generally be a better solution with a couple caveats:

- the profit motive has to be clear and relatively short term.  (For complex issues like environmental concerns, this is not the case and outright capitalist solutions don't tend to work well.)
- profit has to be the goal (it's not profitable to feed the poor for example, but generally folks don't like to have to step over emaciated bodies on the way to their local Starbucks).


Ideally there's a blend of capitalism and socialism, that's better than a pure application of either.  For example, the government can influence markets to provide a greater profit motive to develop clean energy . . . and then the capitalist side optimizes some great new solutions.  This means that we get clean energy sources before the world is in such a crisis that it's absolutely necessary, and we do it more efficiently than via a purely bureaucratic governmental approach.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #21 on: December 01, 2016, 02:56:00 PM »
As far the government having a better track record with regard to environmentalism:

Go review the history of yellowstone.  That will give you the problems in the U.S. with respect to government as a caretaker of the environment.

http://www.yellowstonepark.com/explore/yellowstone-history/

If you read through the glossed over negatives and ask questions like, "what caused that problem they fixed there in the first place" and then understand that the popular understanding of "nature" is a myth that goes something like "humans exist apart from nature."

But the really dramatic example is, when you were a kid in high school, you probably had to learn in your world geography class about large bodies of water.  Any list of large lakes should have included the aral sea, once the fourth largest lake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

It's gone now, because of government policies.  Your kids probably aren't even being taught it was ever there.  Governments are no more uniquely suited to protecting the environment than corporations are.

The public, through informed action, is incredibly effective at changing the behavior of both governments and corporations.  Unless you give the government so much power, like say, by blindly following a political party and voting for 40 years about the same 10 single issues that both parties have kept alive as part of the conversation that keeps them from being held accountable, that they don't truly answer to the people anymore.

Some companies do learn their lessons.  Go talk to an Exxon employee and see if avoiding another Valdez isn't very much a part of the company culture.  And that was over 20 years ago.  Have there been oil spills since?  Yes.  Neither corporations or governments can prevent bad things from happening to good people, and you should be incredibly wary of anyone claiming otherwise.
-----------------------
Government has only increased in complexity and size with increasing population density throughout history, and to humanity's benefit overall.  In fact, there is an arguement that a lot of the problems with the US government is that it isn't big enough and can't properly represent us at our current size, so let's increase the House of Representatives to match a specific ratio of population to elected official.  It would also help people develop a better trust of the government if there was a representative that they saw regularly, which someone would have more time to do if they served less constituants.  Perhaps your problem isn't that government is too big and intrusive, maybe the problem is that it is too small, and the broad brush solutions we come up with to solve problems are too general. 

I guess "local" might not necessarily mean "smaller" in a sense so I might be making a generalization that this is what you mean. 

Another problem is that if one institution can't solve problems effectively, another one tends to pop up in it's place, and it might have another agenda besides helping the public.  Theocracy, technocracy, corpocracy, plutocracy etc....  These tend to work really well for a favored group, but then disregard the rights of other groups in that society leading to instability and possibly violence. 

This is why for the purposes of the discussion, "government" needs to be better defined.  I tend to see it as a part of society dedicated to serving the needs and wants of its citizens without answering to anyone but the citizens of that society.  That obviously is not what we have entirely in the US right now, but it ought to be the ideal that we aspire to.  Even if it doesn't seem effective in solving specific problems, just the very idea that this independent body exists lends stability to a society with different viewpoints because people feel valued and heard.  It is a nice fantasy that we just want government to "work", but there is a symbolic and emotional component to it that is usually underappreciated. 

Private arrangements between groups of citizens that don't answer to a government can be extremely efficient and effective in solving specific problems, but the problem is that they might not see (or want to see) the entire picture, or they might simply decide to disregard the needs of other citizens in the same society.  Again, this creates instability, which means things get LESS efficient in the long run. 



You are absolutely right.  I think the federal government should get much much larger.  It should include every single person.  Well no, wait.  It should be smaller than that.  Maybe everyone except TOYM (that guy's a lunatic) (I really am).  But everyone of those people can then just make decisions for what is best for themselves...wait, shit, that's exactly what I said.

I agree with most of what you said insofar as the idealism behind it.  But the reality that must be recognized is that governmental power has a momentum to it.  The truth is, it isn't that government needs to be bigger, it's that the concept of a lasting government institution should be abhorrent.  Social Security is a great idea.  Social Security forever is a terrible idea.  We have a bunch of senior citizens living in poverty, lets give them money.  Awesome.  But lets also make it so that we, as a culture, learn to deal with the reality of almost as many non-working years as working years.  Culturally adjust to the advancements technology has allowed, where we live longer but can't necessarily be as productive in that old age despite living longer.

Instead, we get social security, which enables a lack of change, a lack of adaptation, and enshrines the problem forevermore.

That's the issue.  Social Security didn't "lift an entire generation out of poverty" or "solve elderly poverty" or "protect the future of all americans."  It institutionalized that how we ensure a healthy, happy retirement for everyone would remain a political topic forever.

That's how government works.

Compare that to things that government is much more suited to, like building an infrastructure thing.  You go in, you build the thing, you set up a measure to maintain the thing, and bam, it's done.  If you take too long you get reprimanded for being bad at your job (as is right and good).

If social security were a highway project, it would still only be one lane and wouldn't lead anywhere, would ask for a bigger budget every year, and wouldn't let 80% of the population use those portions that were finished.  And this is one of the things (social security that is) that is on the list of top government programs.  It's a great program.  But you can't deny that it sucks (benefit relatively small, cost is really high, AND it is just a law so we're constantly fighting about it).

-----------------------

Subsidies as price fixing:

This depends on what kind of subsidy we're talking about.  If you pay a farmer not to grow cotton, you've effectively fixed the price of his cotton crop at what you'll pay him not to grow.  If you imagine the market price as a movable thing, it is an intersection between a number of factors that get updated pretty regularly.  There are a set number of factors affecting this moving point.

It has inertia though.  The price of something isn't moved so much as dragged.  So a rising demand can cause a price spike, particularly if supply can't adjust in real time, but we generally see that it takes a real effort to cause that to happen.  Apple phones on opening day, they don't get auctioned off right?  The price on day 10 tends to be about the same.

It can move, if on day 9 they all start bursting into flames by day 12 the price probably drops, but these are exceptions.

Subsidies work by increasing the inertia of that price point.  If it suddenly became way more profitable to produce corn than cotton, the farmer taking the subsidy to grow nothing instead of cotton ought to make the same calculation as the farmer that is still actually growing cotton.  But he doesn't.  Nobody wants to farm the subsidy but to the extent you are farming the subsidy...inertia.  Information isn't instantaneous, people don't always make the most optimal decision, and the subsidy acts to dampen the rational market response, because it (the subsidy) doesn't react to the response at all, the government has to act to make it do so, and on the timeline of markets government simply can't respond to something so small on an appropriate timescale.

Another great example of price fixing is retailers that offer huge sales at predictable times.  If you waited to buy something until Black Friday, that was an irrational market event brought about by artificially adjusting prices.  Instead of seeking to sell at a mutually agreeable price at all times, retailers artificially inflate the price year round, and then dump on everyone who didn't fall for it all at once.  This is of course oversimplified, but it is in the same wheelhouse.  Once you the retailer establish this pattern, the consumer's spending decisions are perverted by knowledge of the pattern.  The first couple of times you did it, as a retailer, it probably did you in good stead.  Now, it's a lot of effort to sell retail as inefficiently as possible (how much store space is wasted on the 40 checkout lines that get used for 36 hours/yr, how much time spent in line by customers).

If you introduce a low-cost life insurance plan that offers great coverage and doesn't have age limits or considerations of health or exclusions on events like suicide as a government, you force all other insurance providers to compete with that.  They cry foul, because of course nobody could compete with that.  And so you offer a subsidy to cover their losses.  And then they are providing the insurance not because it was a needed or wanted thing, but because they are farming that subsidy.  The exact same thing happens when you offer the subsidy without offering the government option in the first place.  And the same thing happens if you're talking about life insurance or any other kind of insurance.  You've perverted the market because you thought it was a good idea, and forgotten that the government sucks at everything.

Whenever the government involves itself in the price of a thing, and that can take the form of affecting its cost, taxing its providers, or taxing its competition, that is an exercise in price manipulation, and it is a fundamentally evil act.  Not because I say it is, but because it always ends badly, the costs always outweigh the benefits.  Unless you selectively measure the costs, which of course, everyone always does.

Sometimes it is necessary, like when a $20.00 epinephrine shot gets marked up to $700.00.  That's an indicator something has gone wrong, and OK, lets look at how to fix it.  Price control?  There's an easier way, just remove the patent/copy protections for that item.  Patent law should include a whole host of dispatented items that record a history of patent holders who got greedy.

But there you see again, the issue is caused by the government protecting the developer of the technology.  I think it's good to do that in the sense that it promotes innovation.  But since the government sucks at everything, we have to remember that such protections also pervert rational pricing.  So the threat of stripping that protection should be enough to keep developers in check, but lately it has not, especially as regards medical technology.  But there again, as the purchaser of medical technology is increasingly reliant on government funding, they are less able to seek other alternatives, such as buying from providers of medical technology that are ripping off patents.

It just goes round and round.  Inevitably you grind it down back to:  Yes we have to have some government, but everyone doing it needs to understand that government sucks at everything.  So you don't pass some big new thing, and let it just exist forever.

How awesome would america be today if the constitution required every law to include a sunset provision of not more than 10 years?  You'd be able to take a one semester class and learn all the laws.  It would be legal for me to put ice cream in my pocket on Tuesdays.
----------------------------
As to "the government sucks at everything" being a phrasing that doesn't serve my argument.

You're not wrong.  Please just understand that it is in response to a culture that is hell-bent on having half the population bully the other half while acting morally superior about it.  There's a whole host of people on the right and left being absolutely horrible to each other, one side calling the other lazy degenerates and the other calling them uneducated racists who ignore science.

As though either one is standing on the high ground.  That's my point, once you've begun arguing that a government solution is correct, you are not on the high ground.  You are as low as it goes.  We as a society have failed totally, and this is the last ditch effort.

I'm also not calling all government employees lazy.  I don't personally have a problem with a highly paid, great benefits, well staffed work place.  I'm just not going to get all high and mighty about how evil corporations are when they have to actually go out and perform, not to just keep their jobs, but to have any cash at all with which to perform their operations.  If you are funded by tax dollars, you need to have a great deal of humility towards those that are not.  But for whatever reason that has been perverted, and it's just OK to talk about corporations as evil on principle.

RangerOne

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 714
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #22 on: December 01, 2016, 03:01:51 PM »
A better blanket statement may not be that the government is bad at everything. But rather that government is bad at the things the free market is best at. Which basically involves the complex optimizations that result from a healthy free market allowing supply and demand to run its course.

Government can be a great tool to handle defense, bolster science that has cultural and intrinsic value but is potential unprofitable in the short term, ensure a certain standard of public health and education to maintain a strong, educated, and healthy workforce and army.

The last bit is clearly more complicated because education and health both are complex systems that have aspects which are better handled by a free market, while obviously the country at large also benefits from ensuring that even the poorest citizen is in good health and receives a basic standard of education.

I think that you're a little off base in arguing that capitalism is better at handling complexity, and in arguing that issues like defense and 'bolstering science' are not complex.

Capitalism works because of profit motive.  It is efficient because it is self-optimizing (optimizing for profit).  Complexity doesn't factor into it.  If there's sufficient profit motive for something, capitalism will generally be a better solution with a couple caveats:

- the profit motive has to be clear and relatively short term.  (For complex issues like environmental concerns, this is not the case and outright capitalist solutions don't tend to work well.)
- profit has to be the goal (it's not profitable to feed the poor for example, but generally folks don't like to have to step over emaciated bodies on the way to their local Starbucks).


Ideally there's a blend of capitalism and socialism, that's better than a pure application of either.  For example, the government can influence markets to provide a greater profit motive to develop clean energy . . . and then the capitalist side optimizes some great new solutions.  This means that we get clean energy sources before the world is in such a crisis that it's absolutely necessary, and we do it more efficiently than via a purely bureaucratic governmental approach.

But profit motive and supply and demand tunes out the complexity of handling supply and demand with out having to manage that whole system at a central source. I don't mean to imply that a modern military isn't complex but it is simpler than managing the supply and demand of every major commodity in the US. Maybe that is a pointless obvious statement.

There are probably those in the military that see mismanagement and languishing systems that would argue military dollars aren't being used terribly effectively due to the complexity of maintaining an "adequate" military force.

DoubleDown

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 2075
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #23 on: December 01, 2016, 03:09:11 PM »
Here's another fact for the reflexive "government is too big" crowd: The Federal Government workforce is the smallest it's been since before Reagan, by percentage of population. There has been a decades-long trend to "do less with more" that has caused the workforce to decline or remain flat over the years while the country's population has vastly increased. And of course certain government professions (like clerks) have been eliminated almost entirely by automation, which is okay. And then people complain when they get put on hold for 20 minutes at the IRS or SSA, or applications for visas or permanent residency or something similar takes too long. Go figure.

Everyone wants the particular things that are important to them -- environmental protection, strong military, combatting terrorism, VA hospitals, social security checks delivered, national parks to visit, safe food, safe roads and bridges, disease research, whatever -- but they want to get rid of the big ol' bad government that's only wasteful and full of deadbeats, plus all those pesky regulations that do nothing but hold back business and growth. Such a ridiculous cognitive dissonance.

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #24 on: December 01, 2016, 03:11:08 PM »
A better blanket statement may not be that the government is bad at everything. But rather that government is bad at the things the free market is best at. Which basically involves the complex optimizations that result from a healthy free market allowing supply and demand to run its course.

Government can be a great tool to handle defense, bolster science that has cultural and intrinsic value but is potential unprofitable in the short term, ensure a certain standard of public health and education to maintain a strong, educated, and healthy workforce and army.

The last bit is clearly more complicated because education and health both are complex systems that have aspects which are better handled by a free market, while obviously the country at large also benefits from ensuring that even the poorest citizen is in good health and receives a basic standard of education.

I think that you're a little off base in arguing that capitalism is better at handling complexity, and in arguing that issues like defense and 'bolstering science' are not complex.

Capitalism works because of profit motive.  It is efficient because it is self-optimizing (optimizing for profit).  Complexity doesn't factor into it.  If there's sufficient profit motive for something, capitalism will generally be a better solution with a couple caveats:

- the profit motive has to be clear and relatively short term.  (For complex issues like environmental concerns, this is not the case and outright capitalist solutions don't tend to work well.)
- profit has to be the goal (it's not profitable to feed the poor for example, but generally folks don't like to have to step over emaciated bodies on the way to their local Starbucks).


Ideally there's a blend of capitalism and socialism, that's better than a pure application of either.  For example, the government can influence markets to provide a greater profit motive to develop clean energy . . . and then the capitalist side optimizes some great new solutions.  This means that we get clean energy sources before the world is in such a crisis that it's absolutely necessary, and we do it more efficiently than via a purely bureaucratic governmental approach.

But profit motive and supply and demand tunes out the complexity of handling supply and demand with out having to manage that whole system at a central source. I don't mean to imply that a modern military isn't complex but it is simpler than managing the supply and demand of every major commodity in the US. Maybe that is a pointless obvious statement.

There are probably those in the military that see mismanagement and languishing systems that would argue military dollars aren't being used terribly effectively due to the complexity of maintaining an "adequate" military force.

You need to compare apples to apples.  I'd argue that managing a modern military is similar in complexity (probably slightly greater) to managing a huge corporation (Amazon/Google/Apple/Microsoft).

Why is the military not set up to take advantage of efficiency via capitalism?  The purpose of the military should primarily be defense of the nation.  This isn't a profit generating task until a big enough risk arises that doom is impending.  At that point it's too late for a capitalist solution.

Another part that we've forgotten is that the efficiency that capitalism comes over time.  When something fails on the open market that's it.  It's done, and there's a collapse and some chaos for a while.  Then it gets replaced with something better.  For national defense this isn't an optimal algorithm to run . . . because it'll be too late.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #25 on: December 01, 2016, 03:19:30 PM »
The government is better than private industry at doing some things . . . like environmental protection.

I'd argue that's not necessarily true.  The government has a tendency to not know about "good enough" or "cost/benefit analysis". 

Completely made up, let's say you can make a powerplant 99% clean with a filter that costs, I dunno, $10k a year per exhaust stack.  Then there is another filter or process that makes the same plant 99.5% clean, but costs $1M to implement.

I don't trust the government to stop at 99% and not chase that extra .5%, cost be damned.

Except federal government purchasing/spending (in the USA) doesn't work that way at all;  it is the exact opposite, almost to a detriment as pound-foolishness. I don't recall the exact term -- something like "best value proposition" or similar -- but the premise is that the government MUST choose the proposal that meets the MINIMUM criteria at the lowest cost. If another proposal offers more value but costs even one dollar more, it is to be rejected in favor of the less expensive proposal that meets the minimum criteria. This requirement is codified in the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) as a means to curb excessive spending by the federal government, and it's been around a long time.

According to the letter of the law you are correct.  What you are missing is that the regulations you describe cause exactly what he described.  It's fine if the project specification called for 99%.  But what if it called for 99.5%, or worse yet, what if it was vague or open to interpretation?  Even leaving out problems with bad or incompetent individuals making the actual decision (so no kickback factors, outright corruption, or other type things), it is possible to end up making a decision that is decidedly not in the best interests of the project, the original intended goals of the project, the customer being served, or the public, in a way that definitely can still happen in the private sector.  But if the best thing you can say is that the government is no better suited than the private sector to doing things, well, that's sort of my original thesis.

The idea that because something is done under the auspices of a taxpayer backed enterprise it is somehow superior to another way of doing it, because somehow it won't be susceptible to human greed, is flawed.  Not only will the same human factors that lead to failure be present, but additional systemic issues are introduced because it is done under the auspices of government.

Which you alluded to yourself with the "pound foolishness."  So profoundly simple is this idea that it is baked into the very language, particularly within the U.S.  Both parties have just spent a huge amount of effort selling the idea of big government.  And everything that comes from that is fruit from a poisonous tree.

But you know, sometimes the Japanese bomb pearl harbor and you just gotta do what you gotta do.

Lagom

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1258
  • Age: 40
  • Location: SF Bay Area
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #26 on: December 01, 2016, 03:27:16 PM »
A better blanket statement may not be that the government is bad at everything. But rather that government is bad at the things the free market is best at. Which basically involves the complex optimizations that result from a healthy free market allowing supply and demand to run its course.

Government can be a great tool to handle defense, bolster science that has cultural and intrinsic value but is potential unprofitable in the short term, ensure a certain standard of public health and education to maintain a strong, educated, and healthy workforce and army.

The last bit is clearly more complicated because education and health both are complex systems that have aspects which are better handled by a free market, while obviously the country at large also benefits from ensuring that even the poorest citizen is in good health and receives a basic standard of education.

I think that you're a little off base in arguing that capitalism is better at handling complexity, and in arguing that issues like defense and 'bolstering science' are not complex.

Capitalism works because of profit motive.  It is efficient because it is self-optimizing (optimizing for profit).  Complexity doesn't factor into it.  If there's sufficient profit motive for something, capitalism will generally be a better solution with a couple caveats:

- the profit motive has to be clear and relatively short term.  (For complex issues like environmental concerns, this is not the case and outright capitalist solutions don't tend to work well.)
- profit has to be the goal (it's not profitable to feed the poor for example, but generally folks don't like to have to step over emaciated bodies on the way to their local Starbucks).


Ideally there's a blend of capitalism and socialism, that's better than a pure application of either.  For example, the government can influence markets to provide a greater profit motive to develop clean energy . . . and then the capitalist side optimizes some great new solutions.  This means that we get clean energy sources before the world is in such a crisis that it's absolutely necessary, and we do it more efficiently than via a purely bureaucratic governmental approach.

Well said. I don't know why so many assume just because I think the government can be a great force of good I automatically must be talking about the Democratic platform, expanding current programs, increasing bloat, welfare state, etc., etc. I feel like my ideas can't be that unusual but people are so used to thinking in terms of a liberal <> conservative binary that it makes it difficult to engage on any other terms.

I don't think we have an ideal system. I think we are very far from an ideal system. But I also think my utopia of a small but selectively powerful federal government is both more realistic and less likely to have unexpectedly disastrous consequences than pursuing a 100% socialist or libertarian solution, which seem to be the extremes people on either "side" like to use as their straw men. Why is it so crazy to talk about a small, but socialistic government presiding over a largely capitalistic society?

waltworks

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 5653
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #27 on: December 01, 2016, 04:11:32 PM »
Great discussion. I guess for me the government might suck/be incompetent - but for some long term stuff and collective action problem things, you really have no other option. The debate is really about exactly where the market works best/doesn't work (ie healthcare). Stuff like defense, police, courts, and infrastructure, I think most reasonable people will concede there's not an alternative to central authority/government.

-W

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #28 on: December 01, 2016, 04:29:02 PM »
A better blanket statement may not be that the government is bad at everything. But rather that government is bad at the things the free market is best at. Which basically involves the complex optimizations that result from a healthy free market allowing supply and demand to run its course.

Government can be a great tool to handle defense, bolster science that has cultural and intrinsic value but is potential unprofitable in the short term, ensure a certain standard of public health and education to maintain a strong, educated, and healthy workforce and army.

The last bit is clearly more complicated because education and health both are complex systems that have aspects which are better handled by a free market, while obviously the country at large also benefits from ensuring that even the poorest citizen is in good health and receives a basic standard of education.

I think that you're a little off base in arguing that capitalism is better at handling complexity, and in arguing that issues like defense and 'bolstering science' are not complex.

Capitalism works because of profit motive.  It is efficient because it is self-optimizing (optimizing for profit).  Complexity doesn't factor into it.  If there's sufficient profit motive for something, capitalism will generally be a better solution with a couple caveats:

- the profit motive has to be clear and relatively short term.  (For complex issues like environmental concerns, this is not the case and outright capitalist solutions don't tend to work well.)
- profit has to be the goal (it's not profitable to feed the poor for example, but generally folks don't like to have to step over emaciated bodies on the way to their local Starbucks).


Ideally there's a blend of capitalism and socialism, that's better than a pure application of either.  For example, the government can influence markets to provide a greater profit motive to develop clean energy . . . and then the capitalist side optimizes some great new solutions.  This means that we get clean energy sources before the world is in such a crisis that it's absolutely necessary, and we do it more efficiently than via a purely bureaucratic governmental approach.

Well said. I don't know why so many assume just because I think the government can be a great force of good I automatically must be talking about the Democratic platform, expanding current programs, increasing bloat, welfare state, etc., etc. I feel like my ideas can't be that unusual but people are so used to thinking in terms of a liberal <> conservative binary that it makes it difficult to engage on any other terms.

I don't think we have an ideal system. I think we are very far from an ideal system. But I also think my utopia of a small but selectively powerful federal government is both more realistic and less likely to have unexpectedly disastrous consequences than pursuing a 100% socialist or libertarian solution, which seem to be the extremes people on either "side" like to use as their straw men. Why is it so crazy to talk about a small, but socialistic government presiding over a largely capitalistic society?

Capitalism does not work because of a profit motive.  Everything you think you understand about capitalism has been filtered through that perspective which ascribes a morality to economic policy that simply does not exist.  Capitalism isn't greedy.  Capitalism isn't charitable.  Capitalism is amoral.

Capitalism works because when it is at work people have an incentive to produce a surplus.

Capitalism rewards individuals commensurate with the stakes they are willing to bring.  Any restraint on those stakes affects the price of those stakes, and subverts the most efficient outcome.

My thesis was not a comparison of socialism to capitalism.  It is an evaluation of the maximum theoretical capabilities of government.

The best a government solution can be is not the worst. There is always a better way.

Lets take a look at the premise underlying the thesis that capitalist systems aren't as good on the environment.  Understand that the entire argument there is an argument from hindsight.  It is actually quite rare that a private enterprise knowingly engaged in acts that would create loss, except insofar as they were insulated or protected from the effects of that loss by government.  The history as it is written adds a layer of malfeasance upon a corporation which undertook business activities that were later revealed to be beset with negative externalities.

There are quite literally millions of examples of individuals and companies that did the right thing for every example of one that didn't.

The bastions of environmental protection that are heralded as saving us from our own failings are again the result of new realizations we had as a civilization, and the rapid adoption of policies in advancement of our education of the populace regarding the application of the science.

Did we need a law banning CFC's?  Or did we just need a viable alternative and education on the damage caused by CFC's?  Did we need the clean water act?  Or did we just need education on what not to dump where and then a list of companies that refused to stop to boycott?

It was far more advantageous to use the reigns of government to seize power and go after groups that fund your opponents than it was to let things develop, expanding the size, scope, taxing authority and power of the government, while reducing the oversight.

I agree that the efforts of the U.S. government along these lines was not a catastrophe, but the banning of DDT certainly was.  And even where it didn't go horribly wrong, it shouldn't be held up as the best possible outcome.  Environmental protection in the US has been the purview of the federal government for a long time, is a total shitshow (high compliance costs and somewhat terrible outcomes).  If you want to argue that it hasn't been the purview of the federal government, that's fine.  We can do that, but it would be silly.  If you want to argue that it hasn't been a shitshow, well then you sort of have to shut up about global climate change.

Lets look at something else where government has done a job that needed doing badly.  OSHA.

OSHA reduces the stakes you can bring to the table.  As a worker with nothing but their time (life) OSHA and other "fair labor" provisions of government, meant to curtail the "excesses of capitalist greed" used the power of government to do nothing of the kind.  The stakes you could bring to the table are what is reduced.  Willing to work yourself to death for your family?  Too bad, illegal to do that.  It's easy to argue that this is a net good.  It's hard to argue that it's the right thing in every situation.  Life is complicated, and when you make risk calculations on behalf of another, from a place with a wholly different set of needs than that other, you are going to get it wrong as often as not.  And your "right decision" robs another of their ability to negotiate for a higher wage in exchange for higher risk.

It's particularly galling when, at the highest levels of society, we are totally allowed to do that.  I can work all the hours I want at no penalty to my employer.  Those rules exempt me from that "exploitation" and me and everyone I know hasn't experienced the wage stagnation.

It's easy to blame the corporations for stagnating wages, but you've gutted the stakes the lowest in society can bring to the negotiating table.

So the government solution is certainly a solution, but it isn't a good one.  Because the government sucks at everything.

The complexity issue comes into play because it is why the government sucks at everything.

There's simply no way for the government to anticipate how the future is going to unfold.  The best outcome is from individuals being free to respond to situations with the best information they have available making the best decision they can for themselves.

Millions of dollars spent on climate research and weather modelling and nobody can tell me with any certainty what the temperature will be four weeks from today.  And that's just temperature.  Not even asking if it will rain.  The relentless pursuit of a central planning solution is seductive because at its heart it offers the security of predicting the future, but it can't.  The world is just too complex.  As it happens, a really great option is to just let people govern themselves.

But then some of them are assholes so we do end up needing a government.  Just keep in mind that it sucks at everything and we'll be fine.

waltworks

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 5653
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #29 on: December 01, 2016, 05:44:03 PM »
How is "incentive to produce a surplus" different than "greed"? Sounds like 2 different ways to say the same thing to me.

-W

scottish

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 2716
  • Location: Ottawa
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #30 on: December 01, 2016, 07:28:23 PM »
Quote
Did we need a law banning CFC's?  Or did we just need a viable alternative and education on the damage caused by CFC's?  Did we need the clean water act?  Or did we just need education on what not to dump where and then a list of companies that refused to stop to boycott?

You needed the law.   After 30 years in large companies, believe me, you need laws like this.   Industry will happily blow off it's own feet to make a profit.   More specifically, industry executives will do pretty much anything to get their next bonus.    Lehman Brothers, anyone?   Enron?   Salomon Brothers?  Bre-X?

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #31 on: December 02, 2016, 06:43:47 AM »
A better blanket statement may not be that the government is bad at everything. But rather that government is bad at the things the free market is best at. Which basically involves the complex optimizations that result from a healthy free market allowing supply and demand to run its course.

Government can be a great tool to handle defense, bolster science that has cultural and intrinsic value but is potential unprofitable in the short term, ensure a certain standard of public health and education to maintain a strong, educated, and healthy workforce and army.

The last bit is clearly more complicated because education and health both are complex systems that have aspects which are better handled by a free market, while obviously the country at large also benefits from ensuring that even the poorest citizen is in good health and receives a basic standard of education.

I think that you're a little off base in arguing that capitalism is better at handling complexity, and in arguing that issues like defense and 'bolstering science' are not complex.

Capitalism works because of profit motive.  It is efficient because it is self-optimizing (optimizing for profit).  Complexity doesn't factor into it.  If there's sufficient profit motive for something, capitalism will generally be a better solution with a couple caveats:

- the profit motive has to be clear and relatively short term.  (For complex issues like environmental concerns, this is not the case and outright capitalist solutions don't tend to work well.)
- profit has to be the goal (it's not profitable to feed the poor for example, but generally folks don't like to have to step over emaciated bodies on the way to their local Starbucks).


Ideally there's a blend of capitalism and socialism, that's better than a pure application of either.  For example, the government can influence markets to provide a greater profit motive to develop clean energy . . . and then the capitalist side optimizes some great new solutions.  This means that we get clean energy sources before the world is in such a crisis that it's absolutely necessary, and we do it more efficiently than via a purely bureaucratic governmental approach.

Well said. I don't know why so many assume just because I think the government can be a great force of good I automatically must be talking about the Democratic platform, expanding current programs, increasing bloat, welfare state, etc., etc. I feel like my ideas can't be that unusual but people are so used to thinking in terms of a liberal <> conservative binary that it makes it difficult to engage on any other terms.

I don't think we have an ideal system. I think we are very far from an ideal system. But I also think my utopia of a small but selectively powerful federal government is both more realistic and less likely to have unexpectedly disastrous consequences than pursuing a 100% socialist or libertarian solution, which seem to be the extremes people on either "side" like to use as their straw men. Why is it so crazy to talk about a small, but socialistic government presiding over a largely capitalistic society?

Capitalism does not work because of a profit motive.

The profit motive is exactly WHY capitalism works, and why pure socialism is a terrible failure.

Everything you think you understand about capitalism has been filtered through that perspective which ascribes a morality to economic policy that simply does not exist.  Capitalism isn't greedy.  Capitalism isn't charitable.  Capitalism is amoral.

I didn't argue that capitalism followed any particular type of morality.

Capitalism works because when it is at work people have an incentive to produce a surplus.

Capitalism rewards individuals commensurate with the stakes they are willing to bring.  Any restraint on those stakes affects the price of those stakes, and subverts the most efficient outcome.

Yes.  This is the profit motive.



Capitalism rewards individuals commensurate with the stakes they are willing to bring.  Any restraint on those stakes affects the price of those stakes, and subverts the most efficient outcome.My thesis was not a comparison of socialism to capitalism.  It is an evaluation of the maximum theoretical capabilities of government.

The best a government solution can be is not the worst. There is always a better way.[/quote]

My argument is that 'best' and 'worst' are dependent upon the criteria you use to judge a solution.  I'd agree that a government solution is often going to be significantly less cost efficient than a free market solution.  The thing is, sometimes you're not optimizing for dollar figures.  Capitalism only works it's magic when you're optimizing for that sort of cost.


...
But then some of them are assholes so we do end up needing a government.  Just keep in mind that it sucks at everything and we'll be fine.

I don't argue that some companies will choose to do the right thing, even if it effects their bottom line.  What I will argue is that a company that always chooses to do the right thing in spite of the costs to shareholders will often end up losing to companies that don't.  The companies that don't will be more profitable, they will have more money to invest in growing/building, they will have a product price advantage.  Yes, occasionally a company will get caught and called out and suffer tremendous backlash for their practices . . . but there are two problems with hoping that this approach will fix things:
1 - the backlash probably won't be enough to cause lasting harm to the company (see: BP, or Exxon . . . both of which caused tremendous environmental damage due to cost cutting, neither of which experienced lasting damage from it)
2 - sometimes they don't get caught (or the damage doesn't get exposed) for years and years.  Then the problem they've created becomes a problem for a future generation, often after the company causing the problem has disappeared entirely.

As you said earlier, capitalism is amoral.  That causes problems when people expect morality in the decisions that effect millions.  There's nothing wrong with it, this is just a natural effect of the way that capitalism works.  It's why there needs to be a balance between socialistic market control and capitalist free markets for a system to be as efficient as possible while still protecting the people it serves.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #32 on: December 02, 2016, 10:03:45 AM »

1 - the backlash probably won't be enough to cause lasting harm to the company (see: BP, or Exxon . . . both of which caused tremendous environmental damage due to cost cutting, neither of which experienced lasting damage from it)
2 - sometimes they don't get caught (or the damage doesn't get exposed) for years and years.  Then the problem they've created becomes a problem for a future generation, often after the company causing the problem has disappeared entirely.

As you said earlier, capitalism is amoral.  That causes problems when people expect morality in the decisions that effect millions.  There's nothing wrong with it, this is just a natural effect of the way that capitalism works.  It's why there needs to be a balance between socialistic market control and capitalist free markets for a system to be as efficient as possible while still protecting the people it serves.
For number 1:  I don't agree that lasting harm to the companies should be the goal.  There's a difference between justice and revenge.

Just note, in the U.S. currently for the BP spill and for Exxon after Valdez, those companies paid a hefty price in the marketplace.  And those accidents happened despite significant and obscene amounts of money spent on government regulation to prevent them.  Because the government sucks at everything.  So the socialistic market control succeeds at burdening those companies that are doing the right thing while not stopping the bad things from happening.  The EPA all on its own accidentally had a spill not too long ago.

Socialism is also amoral.  It isn't a problem that capitalism is amoral, it's just a fact.  Economic systems, indeed anything that exceeds the individual, lacks morality.  Only individuals are capable of moral actions, morality only applies to individuals.

Giving the individual that does the bad thing (like approving a purchase order for an oil tanker without state of the art navigation, asking for that tanker to be the one that's bought, or any of the decisions in that chain that leads to the spill) a pass by blaming the company is the cause of the problem.  Again, reducing the stakes that the individuals bring to the table.  You know it is wrong when you do it, but you make the evil decision and then hide behind the company, because government has set up the rules to allow that to be possible.

You can hate the idea of liability shields all you want, but they exist because of government, not the other way around.

Number 2 is also a fantastic point.  Because "not getting caught" or "problem goes undetected for years" are both examples of things that get conflated with hindsight.  Again, nobody could predict the future.  It doesn't matter how big you make government, how much power you give it, bad actors will still be able to do bad and negative consequences we know nothing about can't be prevented.  Government hasn't done any better than corporations or individuals at identifying problems ahead of time and taking care of them, politicians have just done an excellent job at blaming the thing that isn't YOU and isn't THEM, corporations.

So 40 years after your grandpa's tire factory goes out of business, someone realizes there is a toxin in the soil that is damaging the locality.  Grandpa didn't do that on purpose, there was no malfeasance, there might have been some negligence, but that's how it goes.  The local community could band together, form a group, start fundraising, and clean up the site.  It might take years to raise the money, they could reach out to the big bad evil corporations, but also to donors, and eventually raise the money, clean it up.  Or they could abdicate that responsibility to the federal government:

https://www.epa.gov/superfund/national-priorities-list-npl-sites-state

Which is what has happened, and stuff doesn't get cleaned up for decades, some of this stuff is never getting cleaned up.

Because the government is inevitably incompetent.  There's no way they will care as much or work as hard to clean up the site that is important to you as you will.  They just won't, they can't.  It isn't possible.  And the difference there, where you stop working on it because the government is going to take care of it, that's where it is fucked up to think of government as the solution.

Particularly when, in the establishment of the government program, they make it harder if not impossible for you to take care of it on your own, as with superfund.

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #33 on: December 02, 2016, 10:47:31 AM »

1 - the backlash probably won't be enough to cause lasting harm to the company (see: BP, or Exxon . . . both of which caused tremendous environmental damage due to cost cutting, neither of which experienced lasting damage from it)
2 - sometimes they don't get caught (or the damage doesn't get exposed) for years and years.  Then the problem they've created becomes a problem for a future generation, often after the company causing the problem has disappeared entirely.

As you said earlier, capitalism is amoral.  That causes problems when people expect morality in the decisions that effect millions.  There's nothing wrong with it, this is just a natural effect of the way that capitalism works.  It's why there needs to be a balance between socialistic market control and capitalist free markets for a system to be as efficient as possible while still protecting the people it serves.


For number 1:  I don't agree that lasting harm to the companies should be the goal.  There's a difference between justice and revenge.

I didn't say that lasting harm or revenge should be the goal.

The underlying motive for a business to do anything should be to generate profit.  If environmental catastrophe costs don't outweigh the benefits of taking safety risks . . . then a company should not attempt to prevent said catastrophe.  This is why it's important to have an organization that is not beholden to profit to look after shared things (like the environment).



Socialism is also amoral.  It isn't a problem that capitalism is amoral, it's just a fact.  Economic systems, indeed anything that exceeds the individual, lacks morality.  Only individuals are capable of moral actions, morality only applies to individuals.

Socialism is a system where the means of production are regulated by the people.  Only individuals might be capable of moral actions, but the government in a democratic nation should be elected by the people to serve the needs of the people.  The government you have reflects the morals and views of the people in your country.



So 40 years after your grandpa's tire factory goes out of business, someone realizes there is a toxin in the soil that is damaging the locality.  Grandpa didn't do that on purpose, there was no malfeasance, there might have been some negligence, but that's how it goes.  The local community could band together, form a group, start fundraising, and clean up the site.  It might take years to raise the money, they could reach out to the big bad evil corporations, but also to donors, and eventually raise the money, clean it up.

Yes, this is an example of a local community acting together to form their own government.  If a local community can't do this for whatever reason, the federal government should get involved to clean things up.  That seems sensible.

Is the process the federal government goes through always efficient?  Nope.  Is it perfect?  Nope.  Is it better than doing nothing (purely capitalist approach to many problems that aren't profitable to tackle)?  Yeah, I'd argue that it is.



Because the government is inevitably incompetent.  There's no way they will care as much or work as hard to clean up the site that is important to you as you will.  They just won't, they can't.  It isn't possible.  And the difference there, where you stop working on it because the government is going to take care of it, that's where it is fucked up to think of government as the solution.

Particularly when, in the establishment of the government program, they make it harder if not impossible for you to take care of it on your own, as with superfund.

I'm with you on one point.  There are problems with the superfund, and federal environmental clean up certainly could be better.

The problem is that you're drawing a false line between 'the government' and 'you'.  You're a citizen of your country.  You should not live in fear of an organization that exists to serve you.  You have the ability to change how your government works through protest, through becoming employed by the government, through running for office, etc.  Giving up on a problem is never the way to solve it.

Papa bear

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1838
  • Location: Ohio
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #34 on: December 02, 2016, 12:22:34 PM »
What was said above: best or worst is a criteria that is not well defined or even agreed upon.

And given that your premise is that all government work is bad, all one should do to refute your stance is to acknowledge one work of government as doing good.

I agree that for means of production, free market will be most efficient (as in lowest cost for total output).  But in a lot of cases, efficiency isn't what is agreed upon as best use. 

A few examples:

Military - most would like a consistent presence, not a military that is only in use if we are attacked.

Post office - sure ups or fed ex can be more efficient.  But the post office was meant to provide a service to all areas, including remote Montana and other remote locations at a reasonable cost.  Efficiency is not #1 goal.

Education - for profit education / free market education is atrocious. A few examples: for profit colleges. They are a joke. So much so that they have been sued and many are out of business. They have an incentive to pass everyone, else they lose a revenue stream.  Even employers know they are a joke and the degrees are worth little to nothing.  Or we can look at the antebellum south. Few people were educated, typically only rich and white.   Genuinely this is seen as bad.  It's been seen as best use is to educate the populace, regardless of means or ability.  Efficient, hell no. But meets the stated goals.  A goal that the free market can't or won't accomplish.

Law enforcement - private organizations won't cover the breadth of every citizen.  Coverage of all citizens is seen as good.

Let's talk environment.  It's been suggested that the market would correct for environmental concerns. Well, the cuyahoga river caught on fire 13 times, starting in 1868.  The last time was in 1969. The market couldn't correct this environmental disaster in over 100 years.  It wasn't until the EPA was enacted that fixed the issues.  Any fires since?  Nope. Do some research on other river fires.  The cuyahoga was one of only a few in the country that caught on fire, including river fires in buffalo, Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.   

Healthcare - an area definitely to be discussed more, Especially for what constitutes  good vs bad. One general argument is that countries with universal healthcare, in the aggregate, have lower infant mortality and longer life expectancies. But the US arguably has the best healthcare money can buy.  So define your good or bad, best or worst, or state what the goal of healthcare should be.

Areas where government increases economic efficiencies:

Enforcement of contracts.  This is codified by a government.  Contract law is incredibly important for any two parties to conduct business.

Creation and Enforcement of a currency:  the government creates a currency that is legal tender for all transactions.  Imagine having different money for each state, let alone county, city, etc.

Creating standards for financial reporting: Why don't you commission an audit for a Fortune 500 company to see if you want to buy some stock? Would the company even let you? Or would you trust the company paying for their own audit?  Standards exist to create a more fair market.

Consumer protection laws: reduce bait and switch, false advertising, or incorrect labeling, etc. It's generally seen as a good use of government regulations. 

I'll go way out on a limb here for this argument. Classic Keynesian economics.  The government should do everything it can to smooth over the peaks and valleys of the market cycle. Spend more during recessions, and pull back when the market heats up. Generally, recession lengths have been shorter since the policy changes after the Great Depression.  Good?  Well, it met its stated goals.  Most would call that effective.

In most or all of these situations, the government is controlling for externalities.  The classic economics of positive and negative externalities. These are not monetary or even necessarily tangible short term items that the government can incentive through subsidies or disincentive through regulation or taxes. 

So, pick one. Just one, that you think is good.  I didn't say most efficient, but good, and your original premise is wrong. 






Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #35 on: December 02, 2016, 12:39:28 PM »
The government you have reflects the morals and views of the people in your country.


It does not.  It cannot.  Governments are not moral.  They are not immoral  The agents of the government, if they are moral people, can act morally, government cannot act morally.  Morality is an individual thing.  What a government can do, is give an amoral or immoral actor a license to use force, and that's dangerous.

This is the key to the whole thing.  The entire concept of a moral society is a corrupt concept.  If there are two trillion perfectly moral citizens led by one immoral leader then that's exactly what there is, the society isn't moral by virtue of how many of its people are moral.

The government you have reflects how much of their own responsibility the people in your country have abdicated to their government.  Definitionally, the larger and more powerful the government, the less "moral" the individuals in that society.  Instead of making decisions based on right and wrong, they've been seduced by the concept of group salvation, and allowed others to be responsible for their moral responsibilities.  They become "righteously indignant" when that government then doesn't live up to how they think of themselves, but it is a false righteousness, because government was never going to be able to do that, and they should have known that before abdicating those responsibilities.

A government that bans abortion is not reflective of a country that embraces the right to life, it is the opposite.  You don't need to make something illegal if nobody wants to do it.  A government reflects only those values that the people in power past and present are trying to force upon those not in power, with threat of, ultimately, violence.

Again, you keep trying to make this an argument favoring capitalism, but the notion of capitalism in the sense you are using it is the rhetorical points used to sell capitalism as an alternative to monarchistic statist economic principles.  From a "void perspective" capitalism doesn't have to compete because without a state oppressing it capitalism is nature.  Nothing is stopping individuals from doing something that doesn't create profit (in strictly monetary terms).  So the argument that capitalism won't tackle certain problems is nonsense.  The first and last act of government should be the establishment that it is the exclusive purveyor of violence.  Letting the natural course of things develop, losers in nature have violence as an option to rebalance the scale.  Government, in other words, removes that last ditch option (or at least, attempts to suppress it).

The premise that the solution requires a centralized effort to tackle is very much borne of a desire, not to solve the problem, but to surrender whatever power necessary to alleviate the burden of solving the problem.  For the low-low price of unemployment insurance, you as an individual can absolve yourself of the responsibility of laying off employees.  For the low-low price of your annual tax bill, you as an individual can ignore problems out in the countryside where the food is grown, in the classroom where the kids are taught, at the hospital where the people are sick, and at the statehouse where things wouldn't work even if you got good people (and you don't have good people).

The exercise of supporting a candidate who is going to solve this thing that needs solving, rather than doing what you can on your own, is you seeking redemption and credit without actually making a difference.

Wages should be higher!  Start a business and pay more.
Housing should be cheaper!  Go buy land/build houses/rent living space cheaper.

Particularly within this community (MMM), the resources exist to do that sort of thing.  Instead, we're investing in the very companies we call out as fundamentally greedy while actively scheming to pay as little in taxes as possible.  "But I support the government!"  Indeed, with taxes as high as they are, and regulation being what it is, and certain problems being just damned difficult to address with the government making that their exclusive purview, you can be forgiven this as a strategy.  But to claim that it isn't a messed up situation that is a direct result of over-sized government is to fundamentally misunderstand the various incentives at work here.

Now, many of the people in the MMM community are actually out there doing this stuff.  This website itself, as a way to liberate folks from excessive taxation, has helped me to have the capital to provide housing to now two low-income families at well below market rate.  And because of the skills I've learned here, I am still able to make a profit doing that.  I don't view this as charity, it's my business.  Providing affordable housing doesn't have to be a government program.  It just has to be something that enough individuals want to do.

Partly because of arguing over the minimum wage on this site, I don't pay less than $15.00/hr for labor.  Nothing is stopping individuals from doing the right thing.  But a big government nanny state is a huge disincentive for a lot of us, because we can always say, "I could afford that if it weren't for the taxes I have to pay so the government can do those sorts of things."

Lagom

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1258
  • Age: 40
  • Location: SF Bay Area
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #36 on: December 02, 2016, 12:46:13 PM »
Very well said Papa bear, especially for having been typed into an iPhone! :O


GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #37 on: December 02, 2016, 01:02:16 PM »
The government you have reflects the morals and views of the people in your country.


It does not.  It cannot.  Governments are not moral.

This is at least the third time in this thread that you've quoted me and then argued against something I didn't say.  I didn't type that governments are moral, or that they necessarily act in a moral way.  I said that the government you have in a democracy reflects the morals and views of the people in your country.


Quote
Instead, we're investing in the very companies we call out as fundamentally greedy while actively scheming to pay as little in taxes as possible.

I don't think that following a profit motive is a bad idea.  Quite the opposite.  I just realize that there are some scenarios that it doesn't optimize a solution for.


Quote
Again, you keep trying to make this an argument favoring capitalism, but the notion of capitalism in the sense you are using it is the rhetorical points used to sell capitalism as an alternative to monarchistic statist economic principles.  From a "void perspective" capitalism doesn't have to compete because without a state oppressing it capitalism is nature.

Agreed.  Naturally people live to about 40, lose all their teeth, and then starve to death alone in the woods.  I'm a fan of all the unnatural benefits of living in a society personally.


Quote
Nothing is stopping individuals from doing something that doesn't create profit (in strictly monetary terms).  So the argument that capitalism won't tackle certain problems is nonsense. 

There have been many examples in this thread already where people have pointed to scenarios where free markets have failed to address problems.  Individuals did do something to fix these issues.  They voted in a government that would address the problems.


Quote
The first and last act of government should be the establishment that it is the exclusive purveyor of violence.  Letting the natural course of things develop, losers in nature have violence as an option to rebalance the scale.  Government, in other words, removes that last ditch option (or at least, attempts to suppress it).

So, you advocate an increase in daily violence as a selling point?  What exactly is your vision of Utopia?


Quote
The premise that the solution requires a centralized effort to tackle is very much borne of a desire, not to solve the problem, but to surrender whatever power necessary to alleviate the burden of solving the problem.

This is your personal theory.  Verification of the theory fundamentally rests on your personal ability to know the motivations of every citizen of a country though.  I don't claim to be able to do that myself.  Given the unverifiable nature of the comment, I'd argue that it says as least as much about your own mindset as it does describe any real situation.

golden1

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1541
  • Location: MA
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #38 on: December 02, 2016, 01:03:46 PM »
Quote
The problem is that you're drawing a false line between 'the government' and 'you'.  You're a citizen of your country.  You should not live in fear of an organization that exists to serve you.  You have the ability to change how your government works through protest, through becoming employed by the government, through running for office, etc.  Giving up on a problem is never the way to solve it.

Exactly.  Perhaps the idea of what we mean by government needs to evolve, to grow even bigger.  We have the technology for each person on the planet to participate in the democratic process in some way.   

Quote
The premise that the solution requires a centralized effort to tackle is very much borne of a desire, not to solve the problem, but to surrender whatever power necessary to alleviate the burden of solving the problem.

Wrong.  The reason why we centralize things is because centralized governments work.  You never addressed my arguement above.  Anthropologically, centralized governments sprung up independently in multiple places around the world for a reason.  Same with writing, and agriculture and lots of other things.  Why?  Because they made people better able to do their primary function, to bear children and reproduce.   Centralized governments have only gotten more complex and more complicated in the span of human history, not less.  If they are such failures, then why do they exist at all?  People who tried these types of governments and eschewed them should have taken over the world by now.  Centralized governments by that definition, are not failures. 

Also, humans have the unique ability to be able to anticipate and predict our possible futures.  This means that unlike any other species on earth (that we know of) we are capable of potentially understanding the long term consequences of our decisions.  Doesn't it make sense that we at least attempt to make use of that capability by designing social structures for that purpose?

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #39 on: December 02, 2016, 02:02:35 PM »
Quote
The problem is that you're drawing a false line between 'the government' and 'you'.  You're a citizen of your country.  You should not live in fear of an organization that exists to serve you.  You have the ability to change how your government works through protest, through becoming employed by the government, through running for office, etc.  Giving up on a problem is never the way to solve it.

Exactly.  Perhaps the idea of what we mean by government needs to evolve, to grow even bigger.  We have the technology for each person on the planet to participate in the democratic process in some way.   

Quote
The premise that the solution requires a centralized effort to tackle is very much borne of a desire, not to solve the problem, but to surrender whatever power necessary to alleviate the burden of solving the problem.

Wrong.  The reason why we centralize things is because centralized governments work.  You never addressed my arguement above.  Anthropologically, centralized governments sprung up independently in multiple places around the world for a reason.  Same with writing, and agriculture and lots of other things.  Why?  Because they made people better able to do their primary function, to bear children and reproduce.   Centralized governments have only gotten more complex and more complicated in the span of human history, not less.  If they are such failures, then why do they exist at all?  People who tried these types of governments and eschewed them should have taken over the world by now.  Centralized governments by that definition, are not failures. 

Also, humans have the unique ability to be able to anticipate and predict our possible futures.  This means that unlike any other species on earth (that we know of) we are capable of potentially understanding the long term consequences of our decisions.  Doesn't it make sense that we at least attempt to make use of that capability by designing social structures for that purpose?

I am not arguing that they are failures.  I am arguing that they are not good at what they are trying to do.  They are better than nothing.  But when we proceed with surrendering power to them to accomplish things, we should do so with the certain knowledge that they won't be good at it.  If the government being good at it is central to the thing you're wanting it to do, then you have gone down a bad path.  They will not be good at it.  Provide clothing to the naked.  Government can do that.  The clothing won't be what those people want or need, it won't fit properly, it won't be comfortable, it won't keep them warm or cover them from the sun, but someone somewhere will be able to check the box that said they did the thing.  Government checks the box on everything, but it's a 1/10 instead of a NA, it is NOT a 10/10.

Everyone being involved in the process is exactly what I am advocating, individual, personal responsibility.  What centralized government does, is exclude certain people from the process.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #40 on: December 02, 2016, 02:57:48 PM »
What was said above: best or worst is a criteria that is not well defined or even agreed upon.

And given that your premise is that all government work is bad, all one should do to refute your stance is to acknowledge one work of government as doing good.

This fallacy is what gets us into the trouble.  I am not arguing that the work is bad!  It isn't evil.  It can't be evil.  It can't be good.  It lacks morality functionally because morality only applies to the individual.  Government is incompetent because the things it is trying to do are too complex to be solved by a discrete solution.  The rule of law is too broad a hammer, problems require a scalpel but all government has is bombs.

Quote
I agree that for means of production, free market will be most efficient (as in lowest cost for total output).  But in a lot of cases, efficiency isn't what is agreed upon as best use. 

A few examples:

Military - most would like a consistent presence, not a military that is only in use if we are attacked.
Well, I could deny the premise.  It's hard to argue against the "long peace" that U.S. military dominance has achieved.  But to argue that this is an example of government doing a great job is to tacitly ignore that the world is not at peace.  It's convenient to blame other governments for our own government's failure to maintain world peace, but it isn't that simple.  The military is the classic example, not of the inherent capabilities of government, but of the thing we need government for even though it sucks at doing this job.

To argue that government can competently perform a military function, you need to show me a country that hasn't been attacked or had to attack anyone as a direct result of government policies.  As it happens, we have one, Switzerland.  There's a culture that on an individual level embraced the idea of national defense and made it each person's (or family's) personal responsibility to defend the nation.  As in, about as decentralized a solution as possible.  This isn't a governmental achievement, specifically by not putting the government in charge, those people have maintained a level of security far greater than our own nation.

Quote
Post office - sure ups or fed ex can be more efficient.  But the post office was meant to provide a service to all areas, including remote Montana and other remote locations at a reasonable cost.  Efficiency is not #1 goal.

Efficiency doesn't have to be the #1 goal.  Government solutions are fine, but we have to recognize how much they suck.  Has the post office embraced modern technology?  Has the subsidy in non-electronic transportation of mail slowed the adoption of electronic business practices?  Is this a thing that is good?  You can argue for having a post office, certainly.  There's good reasons to do it.  But its continued existence at this point is a case study in how bad business practices can persist in government programs far longer than anywhere else.  Instead of the stress of the market forcing adaption to the times, the issues of the past become entrenched burdens on society.

Should the post office be allowed to go bust?  No, but it also can't be defended as some righteously awesome and good force, it's a poorly run business that is serving a purpose, and we ought to be actively looking for a better way.

Quote
Education - for profit education / free market education is atrocious. A few examples: for profit colleges. They are a joke. So much so that they have been sued and many are out of business. They have an incentive to pass everyone, else they lose a revenue stream.  Even employers know they are a joke and the degrees are worth little to nothing.  Or we can look at the antebellum south. Few people were educated, typically only rich and white.   Genuinely this is seen as bad.  It's been seen as best use is to educate the populace, regardless of means or ability.  Efficient, hell no. But meets the stated goals.  A goal that the free market can't or won't accomplish.

One of my favorites.  Here again we see the argument against a thing I wasn't claiming.  Examples of successful private colleges:  every non public university.  You're making a false comparison because I am not arguing for capitalism.  Best colleges in the country for any particular program?  Not a public college.  There are some great public colleges, absolutely amazing.  No doubt.  But there's a reason very few private colleges west of the east coast have ever been able to take off.  It is unbelievably difficult to compete with the public option.

And that cheap public option is one of the reasons we don't have a huge economic push to get away from universities.  Physical locations for learning will always be necessary, but the internet is nowhere close to being properly utilized.  If you don't think public policy is the single greatest impediment to a technological revolution in education, you aren't paying attention.

Outside of the college arena, down to K-12 education, absolutely, do it at the government level.  But don't argue in the same breath that federal government should be involved and that no child left behind sucked.  Government education is inferior to private education.  It has to be.  On a highly local level, advantages can be gained by leveraging scale to acquire specialized instructors and facilities.  This outweighs what is lost to individual tutoring, granted.  However, it also leads to massive spending on select competitive sports, the penultimate in fellow citizens bullying their peers into participating in desired things rather than truly needed things.

Quote
Law enforcement - private organizations won't cover the breadth of every citizen.  Coverage of all citizens is seen as good.
Agreed.  And government is so good at this that we never imprison the wrong people, abuse the rights of citizenry, kill innocents, or confiscate their legal and rightful property without cause.  Except we do all of those things because government sucks at everything.  The lack of a better way is not justification for the sentiment of support the police regardless of what they've done.  We have to keep in mind when establishing these agencies and empowering them that they will suck at their job.  Crime will still happen and injustice will still happen.  So maybe don't empower them to track everyone without cause.  Maybe be serious about probable cause.

Quote
Let's talk environment.  It's been suggested that the market would correct for environmental concerns. Well, the cuyahoga river caught on fire 13 times, starting in 1868.  The last time was in 1969. The market couldn't correct this environmental disaster in over 100 years.  It wasn't until the EPA was enacted that fixed the issues.  Any fires since?  Nope. Do some research on other river fires.  The cuyahoga was one of only a few in the country that caught on fire, including river fires in buffalo, Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.   
The buffalo bayou caught on fire since.  Two years ago.  That's the river going through Houston.  I've done the research.  But your point is well taken.  Clearly the EPA has made a difference, no disputing that.  Clearly the EPA is, and always will be, inadequate to the job.  As any government agency is at any job.  It matters not how much power you give them, they will never be adequate to the job.  It is a systemic problem.
Quote

Healthcare - an area definitely to be discussed more, Especially for what constitutes  good vs bad. One general argument is that countries with universal healthcare, in the aggregate, have lower infant mortality and longer life expectancies. But the US arguably has the best healthcare money can buy.  So define your good or bad, best or worst, or state what the goal of healthcare should be.

The U.S. government can be uniquely evaluated as to competency of providing healthcare.  I'll be condescending here and ask you to go evaluate the 100% public healthcare available on Indian Reservations.  There's no private competition to the US gov't providing that, it is absolutely their responsibility, legally.  Go check it out and then come back and argue that the government doesn't suck at this.
Quote
Areas where government increases economic efficiencies:

Enforcement of contracts.  This is codified by a government.  Contract law is incredibly important for any two parties to conduct business.

Yup.  Again, government is necessary.  But lack of a better alternative is all over this one.  Contract law is responsible for a lot of the failure to hold companies accountable for environmental damage, by the way.  Because the government sucks at everything.

Quote
Creation and Enforcement of a currency:  the government creates a currency that is legal tender for all transactions.  Imagine having different money for each state, let alone county, city, etc.

Imagine having a currency beholden to centuries old tradition, that totally fails to acknowledge changes in technology, such that there is functionally two entire economies, one electronic, and one dark, that enables widespread criminal activity despite a readily available and implementable alternative.  Yea, the government is great at this.
Quote
Creating standards for financial reporting: Why don't you commission an audit for a Fortune 500 company to see if you want to buy some stock? Would the company even let you? Or would you trust the company paying for their own audit?  Standards exist to create a more fair market.
Just for the record, these standards weren't created by the government.  In fact, hardly any standards are.  They are written by the industry and adopted by the government.  Standards are the ultimate example of self regulation.  The industries write these standards specifically because they can't trust the government to do it.  Because the government sucks at everything.

Quote
Consumer protection laws: reduce bait and switch, false advertising, or incorrect labeling, etc. It's generally seen as a good use of government regulations. 
Really?  Buyer beware is still probably the best lesson you can teach your kids upon their first paycheck.  The great consumer protection actions of the past 50 years were all initiated by the evil corporations taking responsibility on their own to protect their customers.  Not all, but sure as shit wasn't government doing it.
Quote
I'll go way out on a limb here for this argument. Classic Keynesian economics.  The government should do everything it can to smooth over the peaks and valleys of the market cycle. Spend more during recessions, and pull back when the market heats up. Generally, recession lengths have been shorter since the policy changes after the Great Depression.  Good?  Well, it met its stated goals.  Most would call that effective.

It is very difficult to argue against the raw data in terms of death caused by unemployment.  So if you believe in prognostications and accept the premise that all of those regulations "smoothed out the curves" and not "shaved off the top to hide the damage as delayed progress" then sure.  But it is also really hard to argue that the government is doing a good job when:

a massive government bureaucracy with virtually unlimited resources to investigate the financial sector failed to imprison more than one big bank employee or credit rating employee after what was, in fact, outright fraud and corruption
a massive government bureaucracy with virtually unlimited resources to investigate individuals operating in the financial sector failed to imprison a massive ponzi scheme operator despite being explicitly informed of what was happening more than a decade before thousands of people lost their life savings.

Not a single government employee lost their job or was even reprimanded over this.
Quote

In most or all of these situations, the government is controlling for externalities.  The classic economics of positive and negative externalities. These are not monetary or even necessarily tangible short term items that the government can incentive through subsidies or disincentive through regulation or taxes. 

So, pick one. Just one, that you think is good.  I didn't say most efficient, but good, and your original premise is wrong. 

Except that you entirely misunderstood my original premise.  I am not arguing for anarchy.  Government is necessary.  My premise is that it is inherently incompetent.

In particular, with respect to the U.S. government, I particularly like Article 1 sections 8 and 9 of the U.S. constitution which very clearly spell out the things Congress ought to be doing.  Instead they're arguing about which freedoms to restrict and how many different ways they can spend the taxes/accumulate new debts.

And the justifications and rationalizations people use for supporting their particular candidate invariable involves some sort of moral argument for the necessity of a particular program, to which a rational response is:  If that is so important, why on earth would you trust it to the government to see it done?

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #41 on: December 02, 2016, 03:12:16 PM »
And the justifications and rationalizations people use for supporting their particular candidate invariable involves some sort of moral argument for the necessity of a particular program, to which a rational response is:  If that is so important, why on earth would you trust it to the government to see it done?

You've said several times that government is necessary, and you're not arguing for anarchy.  I'm going to start by asking you the question:

Why is government necessary?

The answer is that the government is able to do things that individuals and private corporations cannot or will not.  You can spit and bluster about the government being the worst at everything they do, but by admitting that they are necessary you're also tacitly acknowledging that they are the best available . . . because nobody else will (or is capable) of doing it.

Why would you entrust something to the government?  Because there are many problems that are not realistically solvable in any other way.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #42 on: December 02, 2016, 03:44:26 PM »
And the justifications and rationalizations people use for supporting their particular candidate invariable involves some sort of moral argument for the necessity of a particular program, to which a rational response is:  If that is so important, why on earth would you trust it to the government to see it done?

You've said several times that government is necessary, and you're not arguing for anarchy.  I'm going to start by asking you the question:

Why is government necessary?

The answer is that the government is able to do things that individuals and private corporations cannot or will not.  You can spit and bluster about the government being the worst at everything they do, but by admitting that they are necessary you're also tacitly acknowledging that they are the best available . . . because nobody else will (or is capable) of doing it.

Why would you entrust something to the government?  Because there are many problems that are not realistically solvable in any other way.

Absolutely!  But there's a world of difference between the government doing something and the government doing something well.

My argument is that the government is incompetent, not that it is unnecessary.  My argument is that having the government do it doesn't actually solve the problem.  It is a treatment, not a cure.  And we should talk about it in those terms.

Poverty is a problem, we're going to use government to treat x, y, z.  But the solution rests with you, the individuals, get out there, get involved, solve the problem.

The issue is with the rhetoric used to get funding for x, y, z is that it purports to solve the problem.  It absolves citizens of their duty to make the treatment unnecessary.

Nobody is out there trying to invent a business model that will let senior citizens be productive.  In part this is because social security is there and this isn't seen as a useful/needed thing.  It's also made more difficult because social security is there, there's less incentive for them to want to be productive.  That's a shitty example for the perspective of an early retirement group of people but whatever, it's getting late.

The best solution to any problem is for the culture to adapt to remove the issue without any government involvement.  Correct?  Far better than a military would be a world culture where violence just doesn't happen anymore.

I don't advocate getting rid of the military, I just advocate against government solutions that remove efforts towards eliminating the problem.

War is so bad, that civilization is still actively working towards being better at waging peace.  The broad bipartisan support for free trade is an example of this.  Progress is being made.  Lowering barriers to trade is actively being worked on globally.  Deconstructing these barriers (governmental barriers btw) is progress.

Poverty is so bad, but the solutions being worked on are big government solutions.  And that, fundamentally, doesn't make sense.  I'm not saying government causes poverty.  But it also doesn't cure it.  You want to treat the disease, fine.  But it isn't evil when you ask for more money for treatment for me to oppose you.  There comes a point where each dollar for treatment is a dollar coming away from the search for a cure.  The argument over that point is not a moral one.  It is a practical one.  It is absolutely about efficiency.

So the opposition to expansion of a good spending program is not evil.  The opposition to expansion of any government is not evil.  It isn't racist or bigoted.  That governmental program is a bad way to do it.  It might not be the worst, but it isn't something that will work.  It isn't something that will be well done.

The box may get checked.  Yup, we solved poverty again in 2016!  Check!  But it wasn't solved.  Progress wasn't made.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #43 on: December 02, 2016, 04:04:47 PM »
Here's an example on the healthcare front.

Health insurance is a great benefit to have correct?  There are problems with it though.  Namely, you can lose it.  Prior to the ACA, it was tied to your employer and could exclude you based on pre-existing conditions, so if you got sick and then lost your job, you could be uninsurable at your next job.

So there's a problem here.  The politicians blame the insurance companies or the employers, but really, it was the fault of government.

Making health insurance tax deductible for insurance purchased through your employer was a profoundly stupid way to do it.  The ACA has a huge flaw in that it doesn't just undo that particular bit of dumbassery.  Set an amount per year that an employer can give their employees tax-free provided they spend it on health insurance.  The insurance companies then have to figure out how to sign people up.

You then have one open enrollment period, protect people under a certain age from being discriminated against on coverage for pre-existing conditions, and now you've undone the damage done by government.  If you don't have insurance you aren't protected, but since that is how insurance works that is OK.

But since we first insisted on blaming the insurance companies, it can't be that simple can it?  We have to go make it all complicated.  And so the government-created problem becomes an ongoing societal cost of subsidized costs and indirect payments, such a huge fucking mess that, honestly, you have to seriously consider just nationalizing the whole system.

Or you could've kept government out of it entirely, healthcare is just a cost like any other, consume the service or don't, pay your own damn bills.  If you can't afford it and no one will give it to you as charity, you die, or you pay for it with debt and then default, or whatever.  It wouldn't be a perfect system.  What we have now is not a perfect system.  The government being involved is, at best, making it slightly better.  State hospitals that pick up the poorest patients is an example of this.  These existed before health insurance and before medicare.  Private, for profit or not for profit hospitals, also existed.  Things used to suck, then they got better.  It is impossible to say where we'd be without massive government spending on healthcare.  Government intervention, at this point, is incredibly costly to medical providers.

With the government controlling virtually every aspect of it at this point, costs are still going up faster than inflation, quality of care is stagnant except for advancements in technology, and it is a bigger pain in the ass then ever to work in healthcare.

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23129
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #44 on: December 03, 2016, 08:28:47 AM »
And the justifications and rationalizations people use for supporting their particular candidate invariable involves some sort of moral argument for the necessity of a particular program, to which a rational response is:  If that is so important, why on earth would you trust it to the government to see it done?

You've said several times that government is necessary, and you're not arguing for anarchy.  I'm going to start by asking you the question:

Why is government necessary?

The answer is that the government is able to do things that individuals and private corporations cannot or will not.  You can spit and bluster about the government being the worst at everything they do, but by admitting that they are necessary you're also tacitly acknowledging that they are the best available . . . because nobody else will (or is capable) of doing it.

Why would you entrust something to the government?  Because there are many problems that are not realistically solvable in any other way.

Absolutely!  But there's a world of difference between the government doing something and the government doing something well.

You're complaining about the best available option.  This is simply not productive.  If you had a better alternative that you were offering, or suggestions for improving the way that things are that would be one thing.

It's like coming across a homeless man ranting about how damned yellow the sun is.  Yeah he says, the sun is important . . . it provides light, heat, the energy for life to continue on the planet.  But it's too damned yellow!  That sun is totally the worst and useless because it's so yellow.

So this has to be the point in the thread where I mumble my agreement that the sun certainly is damned yellow (carefully not agreeing that the sun is the worst because that's silly), and sidle my way to a clear patch of road to keep walking on.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #45 on: December 03, 2016, 09:32:52 AM »
And the justifications and rationalizations people use for supporting their particular candidate invariable involves some sort of moral argument for the necessity of a particular program, to which a rational response is:  If that is so important, why on earth would you trust it to the government to see it done?

You've said several times that government is necessary, and you're not arguing for anarchy.  I'm going to start by asking you the question:

Why is government necessary?

The answer is that the government is able to do things that individuals and private corporations cannot or will not.  You can spit and bluster about the government being the worst at everything they do, but by admitting that they are necessary you're also tacitly acknowledging that they are the best available . . . because nobody else will (or is capable) of doing it.

Why would you entrust something to the government?  Because there are many problems that are not realistically solvable in any other way.

Absolutely!  But there's a world of difference between the government doing something and the government doing something well.

You're complaining about the best available option.  This is simply not productive.  If you had a better alternative that you were offering, or suggestions for improving the way that things are that would be one thing.

It's like coming across a homeless man ranting about how damned yellow the sun is.  Yeah he says, the sun is important . . . it provides light, heat, the energy for life to continue on the planet.  But it's too damned yellow!  That sun is totally the worst and useless because it's so yellow.

So this has to be the point in the thread where I mumble my agreement that the sun certainly is damned yellow (carefully not agreeing that the sun is the worst because that's silly), and sidle my way to a clear patch of road to keep walking on.

Ha!  So forgetting for a second that government isn't nearly as important as the sun.  Indulging the straw man.

I'm the guy arguing for respecting the power of the sun.  People proposing big government solutions to problems are the homeless people on the street ranting about using "lasers" to change the color of the sun, at the low low price of 900 billion dollars.

But as I wasn't arguing that the government is worst per se, certainly I repeatedly said that it is better than nothing, I'll take your agreement with the point that it certainly could be better.

I did propose some options, namely, that if you identify a government rule that is causing a problem, you eliminate the rule, not make a new rule to try and fix it.  We are where we are because of bandaids on top of bandages on top of leeches on top of stitches on top of a failure of personal responsibility.  So concerned are we with not admitting we were wrong, so prideful are we, that we can't stand any arguments in opposition to things we think are good, regardless if they are valid.

Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society.  This conversation is about recognizing that failures of government are not the result of whatever partisan bullshit the politicians espouse, but because of a fundamental weakness of government.

You don't strengthen the social safety net by increasing the size of government.  You do it by reducing the government's ability to suck at providing the safety net.

So basic income works better than [40 different government programs].  That's the point.

The left implements social security.  The right implements measures to crack down on fraudulent social security claims.  Neither side is willing to admit that government can't possibly provide adequate social security or prevent fraud, while asking for more money and power to do exactly that.  And the programs are hailed as a "success" despite clearly failing by any reasonable metric.

And then, despite barely limping along under the crushing weight of government burdens, both sides take credit for the success of individuals and blame others for their own failures.

The talking points on both sides get ever better at coming up with metrics that justify what they are saying, and both sides, rightly, call out the other for manipulating the narrative.

My favorite lately is "every x dollar in government spending caused y dollar in economic growth" which has the virtue of being true in the sense that the dollar was just printed out of nowhere at this point, our leaders having abandoned sound fiscal policy because "read my lips, no new taxes" cost a decent leader his job.  It's unbelievably false in an absolute sense, if government spending lead to economic growth the soviet union would have colonized half the universe by now.

libertarian4321

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1395
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #46 on: December 05, 2016, 02:38:06 AM »
Here's another fact for the reflexive "government is too big" crowd: The Federal Government workforce is the smallest it's been since before Reagan, by percentage of population. There has been a decades-long trend to "do less with more" that has caused the workforce to decline or remain flat over the years while the country's population has vastly increased.

Not really.  It's "smoke and mirrors."  Sure, those with official government positions may have decreased ever so slightly, but they did it by simply hiring contractors.

So instead of having 5 government people and 1 contractor on a task as you may have had 20 years ago, you now have 4 government people and 4 contractors.

The net effect is:  More people working for the government, more people being paid by the government, bigger bureaucracy, more cost to the taxpayer, still not a lot getting done.

I've worked for a bunch of environmental consulting firms, large and small, that do all or almost all their work essentially direcly for the Federal government.  The business is booming.


shenlong55

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 528
  • Age: 41
  • Location: Kentucky
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #47 on: December 05, 2016, 12:03:12 PM »
TOYM, I see you pointing out a lot of places where our current/past government has been incompetent but I can imagine solutions to almost of those problems.  That's my point, if I can imagine ways to fix 90% of the problems that you see in government, then it's probably not a systemic problem.  It just means that our government needs to be designed better.  I'm not sure you're entirely disagreeing with me though.  You seem to be keen on UBI as a replacement for the social safety net and that's just the kind of better design that I'm talking about.  I completely agree that the government that we have is incompetent in a lot of ways, but I think we should be improving the design of our government to make it more competent rather than tearing it down.

Government is incompetent because the things it is trying to do are too complex to be solved by a discrete solution.  The rule of law is too broad a hammer, problems require a scalpel but all government has is bombs.

I would argue that if all government has is bombs then it's because we've designed our government to only have bombs.  Maybe we should redesign it to include some scalpels...

I also had a few side questions based on your previous posts...

-----------------------

Subsidies as price fixing:

It kind of sounds like you view any and all market interventions as price fixing, is that an accurate reading of this section?

Nobody is out there trying to invent a business model that will let senior citizens be productive.  In part this is because social security is there and this isn't seen as a useful/needed thing.  It's also made more difficult because social security is there, there's less incentive for them to want to be productive.  That's a shitty example for the perspective of an early retirement group of people but whatever, it's getting late.

I'm curious why you don't see Social Security as a solution to elderly poverty.  It sounds like you want somebody to come up with a business idea to employee senior citizens.  Personally I would like to see increased leisure time and less work for everyone, so social security is my solution to elderly poverty.

fa

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 233
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #48 on: December 05, 2016, 01:34:28 PM »
Didn't read all the postings.  Government is by definition a monopoly, and one that can be enforced with guns and incarceration no less.  No private entity possesses so much power.  The people in government are no different than other people.  They work for their own best interest.  Nothing wrong with that, but good to be aware of.  Of course, having a guaranteed job for life does not generally make people work harder.

In addition, government is very complex and too far away.  The stakeholders (i.e. taxpayers) are too busy working hard to pay the bills and their taxes.  They do not have the time nor the understanding to do any oversight.  So the oversight falls to the elected officials who are being buttered up by the lobbyists paid by others to get tax money for them.

All of these factors set up a potent cocktail as to why government is not constrained in a way that private businesses or individuals are.  Such level of power has a strong tendency to lead to abuse of that power.  You can see that throughout history.  The US is not any different in that way.  History shows that effective democratic oversight is easier said than done.  I would call it incompetent as in not getting the outcome we wanted and getting a low return on our investment of tax dollars.

TheOldestYoungMan

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 778
Re: Can you convince me that government is inevitably incompetent?
« Reply #49 on: December 06, 2016, 09:39:32 AM »
TOYM, I see you pointing out a lot of places where our current/past government has been incompetent but I can imagine solutions to almost of those problems.  That's my point, if I can imagine ways to fix 90% of the problems that you see in government, then it's probably not a systemic problem.  It just means that our government needs to be designed better.  I'm not sure you're entirely disagreeing with me though.  You seem to be keen on UBI as a replacement for the social safety net and that's just the kind of better design that I'm talking about.  I completely agree that the government that we have is incompetent in a lot of ways, but I think we should be improving the design of our government to make it more competent rather than tearing it down.

Government is incompetent because the things it is trying to do are too complex to be solved by a discrete solution.  The rule of law is too broad a hammer, problems require a scalpel but all government has is bombs.

I would argue that if all government has is bombs then it's because we've designed our government to only have bombs.  Maybe we should redesign it to include some scalpels...

I also had a few side questions based on your previous posts...

-----------------------

Subsidies as price fixing:

It kind of sounds like you view any and all market interventions as price fixing, is that an accurate reading of this section?

Nobody is out there trying to invent a business model that will let senior citizens be productive.  In part this is because social security is there and this isn't seen as a useful/needed thing.  It's also made more difficult because social security is there, there's less incentive for them to want to be productive.  That's a shitty example for the perspective of an early retirement group of people but whatever, it's getting late.

I'm curious why you don't see Social Security as a solution to elderly poverty.  It sounds like you want somebody to come up with a business idea to employee senior citizens.  Personally I would like to see increased leisure time and less work for everyone, so social security is my solution to elderly poverty.

Thanks for the questions, I appreciate the discussion.  Don't focus so much on the details of possible solutions to the specific problems, and don't think of it as tearing down government.  Look at UBI as an example.  I don't think UBI is a good idea.  I think it is a better alternative to the current social safety net.  That's an important distinction.  Where UBI is better is that it is the least interventionist way to have a largely unnecessary program.  I get it though, if you believe that modern society would let children starve to death absent government intervention, then yes, it's necessary to have that government intervention, I just don't have such a jaded view of the american public (or any other developed nation).

Re: scalpels.  That's the fallacy I'm trying to point out.  The lack of scalpels isn't a design flaw in our particular construction of government, it is impossible for government to work that way.  For it to work that way, it would have to be impossibly large and powerful, and would become so large that we instead call it the culture or the people.  The scalpel is the individual being personally responsible for making the right decision and being free to do so.  Go back to the milk example, the government simply cannot make the right decision for how to help you.  And so we get big clumsy things like the EITC or SNAP.

re: price fixing.  That would be a fair recasting of how I view it.  If you look at the effects of price fixing, the negative externalities, the temptation is to blame that on bad actors.  However, as their behavior is perfectly consistent with rational actors exposed to new conditions, it is wrong to do so.  It shouldn't be surprising that artificially fixing a price too low causes shortages, and too high causes surplus (any more than it shouldn't be surprising to realize we can't possibly fix it at "just right").  What might be a revelation is that if you take the negative externalities associated with explicit price fixing, and look at other things that also cause that same set of externalities to occur, you arrive at the total group of actions described as governmental market interventions.  So I lump them altogether not by what we intended to do (fix price) but by what we actually did (fuck everything up).

Re: social security.  I said at the time it was a bad example because this is a pretty good program, and at the time it was something that really did make a huge difference to a lot of people.  Social security is probably the thing that created the middle class, as it freed people from their parents as burdens.  So there's no disputing the good that it did, which means I don't like bringing it up in this context because most people haven't really thought about what social security has done, and while some of it might be nice, doesn't mean it isn't wrong.

So the first thing:  There are old people eating catfood.  So as good as it is, it clearly is not enough.  And its failures aren't talked about, and its presence makes it harder to get help for what still remains: seniors do still live in poverty.  Nobody is working on that problem.  You see the occasional newspaper article talking about tips to live on social security, like getting a roommate or sharing a car with another senior, but the fact that it is hailed as a "solution" while being an underwhelming standard of living at best proves my point.

For most of America, the generational household is a thing of the past.

I'm going to posit that this isn't necessarily a good thing.  I get it, living with your parents sucks.  But it is economically devastating to a multitude of people that moving out before you can support yourself is "normal."  That transition began as a direct result of social security.  You could kick out your ungrateful scumbucket teenager kid (because you wouldn't need them in your old age), you could kick out your ungrateful scumbucket parent (because now they don't need you).

Social security kicked off a generational arms race, where now parents don't have to maintain relationships with their children and children don't have to feel guilty about providing for their parents.

This is great!  This is also terrible.

It was necessary.  People suddenly able to live a lot longer but work still not being something one can (or would want) to do post becoming old and decrepit.  But here it is 60 something years later (I didn't do the math on that just, whatever, it's been around awhile), and rather than figuring out something better than social security, we've just glossed over these aspects, say its the greatest thing, joke about how it is unsustainable, and carry on.  Anyone who grew up with a grandparent that lived with them can probably relate to how foreign and strange that was to all of their friends.  All of those grandparents, if they didn't grow up with a grandparent living with them it was because the grandparent was dead.  The greatest generation, were raised by their whole families, not just parents.  Our parents, by contrast, saw their grandparents twice a year at most.

All so we can spend as much possible to live in half-empty houses as far from each other as possible.  Worth it.

It's almost as though the negative externalities in government get ignored at the expense of the public while the entrenched governmental interest carries on.  I thought that was something that was only true of evil corporations trashing the environment.  Hmmm.