This guy takes it as a given that the Government is well-run and wise. But what's the practical alternative for someone who instead thinks that the current political environment is toxic and insane?
Nobody is saying either solution is great. All it's saying is that: wouldn't it be better to have all this power be in the hands of the democratically chosen, versus billionaires who may or may not be making relevant investments?
edit: Just downvotes, no response?
I do not take it as a given that, when the government spends money, anyone thought how it was spent was a good idea (like spending 8 billion dollars to design a tank... yes, that's billions, with a "b" (also, I love that movie))
Furthermore, all you're doing is cherry picking data points to support your argument without factoring in that military and medical equipment all have huge, onerous requirements for tracking every step of the supply chain, to the mine the metal came out of, which makes cost structures very weird.
What about the Manhattan Project, or the Hoover Dam, or the Interstate System. Bad investments? See, I can cherry pick too.
This assumes the money in question belongs to the state to begin with, and we're merely deciding how it is to be allocated. That is not the case. This is not the rich deciding what to do with the public money, it's the rich deciding what to do with their own money.
I think we would all agree, regardless of level of income, we would rather our own money be allocated to the causes that we support, rather than the causes that 51% of people support.
No, I wouldn't agree on that at all. That runs entirely counterproductive to what our society is built on. This is the arrogance people talk about - you think you know what is better for people than they do.
Where do you think Federal Reserve Notes come from?
Exactly. Nobody thinks that the government can make better use of their own money; however, many people want to use the government to tell other people what to do with their money.
> wouldn't it be better to have all this power be in the hands of the democratically chosen
In a word: no.
Although the state spends some money on things that aren't abhorrent - broken clock politics as it were - it also spends money killing, torturing, and imprisoning people.
So I think it's a very defensible moral stand to give the state as little money as possible.
Where did I say that?
I'm not the cynic you seem to whom you seem to be responding; I believe that the internet age will empower nonviolence from non-state actors as well as an end to the violence of government.
Although we may have needed government to stifle private violence in the past, I don't think we do any longer.
> the people staffing the bureaucracies and agencies don't have their (non-existent) bonus tied to how hard they fucked a customer over.
For most reasonable definitions of "bonus" for a bureaucrat, I think that this statement is false. Oliver North and John Yoo is not in prison. Hillary Clinton is running for President. These people all received bonuses for wrecking havoc on a level about which no private entity can dream.
We moved from private jackbooted-thugs-for-hire to public police protection because thugs-for-hire are unaccountable. Sadly, over the past hundred years or so we've forgotten this lesson, lost our vigilance, and have permitted many of our public servants to make themselves largely unaccountable for their actions.
Power and leadership structures naturally emerge in sufficiently large groups of people. This is unavoidable, even in sufficiently large anarchist organizations.
As the Dothan, AL incident has most recently demonstrated, evil people come to power from time to time. All healthy organizations must be able to detect evil people and remove them from power.
In your future where government is no longer permitted to apply force, where is the accountability? Who detects and ejects evil? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I assert that, in a social dynamic characterized by omnipresent personal recording devices, the capacity to share the gathered evidence, and the capacity to deliberate and apply social pressure in response to criminal behavior, that accountability is the natural consequence.
Did you hear about the one where Social Justice Warriors bullied an artist into a suicide attempt because they felt her fan art "erased fat people" and that her use of the interjections "dude" and "man" when speaking to women made her "transmisogynistic"? [0][1]
This all happened on-the-record, on the Internet.
How does your social theory account for this incredibly harmful behavior?
What is an adequate response to this behavior under the system that you propose?
[0] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/02/sjws-bullied-a-youn...
[1] http://www.dailydot.com/geek/steven-universe-fanartist-bulli...
Are you serious? How about voting with your voice. Next you'll be arguing that we should vote with bullets and that'll make a democracy.
There are things that you simply can't "vote with your dollars" for. And you sure as shit can't do it if you don't have any money.
Compare the NSA to Palantir.
Compare NASA to SpaceX.
Compare the Treasury to Enron.
Compare Bell Labs with WorldCom.
Your argument isn't as strong as your Econ 101 textbook made it out to be.
Many economists would consider this to be a problem that falls under their realm of expertise.
Can you provide counterexamples? If you look, there is plenty of competency in both sectors.
Econ 101 doesn't opine on the relative efficiency merits of government vs private sectors...makes me wonder if you have ever even taken an economics course. You misrepresent both Economics as a field of study and the argument I was trying to make (which was an argument by logical reasoning, not economic reasoning). If you'll notice, I even mentioned a specific government (the german government) as one I would entrust my money to, so it should be pretty fucking obvious the argument never was about government vs private, but rather our government vs private.
> Can you provide counterexamples? If you look, there is plenty of competency in both sectors.
Yes, I can provide counterexamples, but that I'm not gonna beat up your straw man for you. There is plenty of competency in both sectors, but you can't deny that if my money goes to the US government, that a significantly large portion of it will go to extremely bad ideas, such as blowing arabs up and funding the militaries of foreign governments that will help blow up more arabs, subsidizing millionaire farmers, subsidizing automobile travel, creating laws that imprison people for victimless crimes and building the expensive prisons to house them for mandatory minimum amounts of time, etc.
Sure, we democratically elected this shit, but we could democratically elect any pile of shit and it would still be a pile of shit. I see no utilitarian value in respecting the whims of 51% of the population.
I guess you haven't been paying attention to SpaceX.
With the exception of commodity things like their microchips, they've built all of their tech from scratch. They can deliver payloads somewhere between 33% and 66% cheaper than anyone else. Their safety record is really, really good. They're doing things with their launch vehicles that noone else is.
SpaceX is the best goddamn thing to happen to spaceflight since the Cold War Space Race.
I think we can both agree that the term "democratically chosen" contains many positive connotations which simply don't apply to the current US government. If I were a billionaire, I personally would do as much as legally possible to keep my money out of the hands of the government and personally seeing that it is used for the betterment of society. Because frankly, the idea that the current US government is effectively spending this money for our betterment is ridiculous.
I trust the guy who wants to use his own money to build a legacy for himself. He has more motivation to get results than a government bureaucrat making decisions about spending someone else's money.
Sure. If you want your money to go to the causes that everybody else supports, then absolutely, you should give more money to the government.
However, if you want the money to go to underfunded fields, or areas in which the government doesn't support at all, then you're left with making contributions to non-governmental charities or organizations.
I regularly donate to the EFF, ACLU, SAF, CBLDF, and St. Jude, Habitat for Humanity, among others. Of that list, only St. Jude and Habitat could be arguably better spent through direct taxation. It's possible that the government does more for children's cancer and housing the homeless than those charities do -- it is not possible that the government does a better job of acting as a watchdog agency for the government than the EFF, ACLU, SAF or CBLDF.
Beyond that, when I donate directly, I get the satisfaction of knowing that none of the money given goes towards causes I do not support, like war-making, privacy violations, etc.
EDIT: I picked the US government, but I doubt many other countries have to look for to see ludicrously immoral and unethical expenditures of their own.