I think if the gov't was a bit more efficient and could be shown to be good stewards of money I'd probably hate paying taxes a lot less.
I guess it's fine to hate your government, but a better solution is to change it than avoid paying tax. Because if people pay less tax then then the poor and vulnerable will be affected first, not the corrupted interest group.
Those "transparency indexes" tend to reflect the biases (cultural and political) and the interests of the major contributors to the organizations that produce them (including organizations like OECD).
And unlike measurable data, where you can double check, here you have to agree not just on the methodology, but on the validity of various sources, self-reporting (which is often used as a proxy), etc.
The GINI coefficient may be a better proxy than those targeted measurements.
While whinging about taxes is a national pastime here in the US, we have one of the highest tax compliance rates in the world. These might be related. And it's not true that you can make taxes go away with accounting magic, although there seems to be a growing sentiment that "the other guy is doing it". Example: Bourdain's comment about avoiding taxes by living abroad is nonsense.
You are right: It's not proof that it can't work. However, despite extensive attempts, we also have no proof that it works, and plenty of proof that government welfare systems work far better than the charitable solutions that preceded them.
Governments do that all the time. Look at the shitty schools we in USA force poor black kids to attend. It's easy to be confused by all the demonization and expectation-lowering we get from the media, if one pays attention to that shit. The end result is the same: if we changed public education at all, we might possibly inconvenience some suburbanites, therefore it's most efficient to just screw minorities and the poor as we have for decades.
[1] http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-ef...
So no, it's not a straw man. Some conservatives really do believe this.
Weak man vs. straw man.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
A handful of extremists are not representative.
AFR were extremists a couple years ago, sure, but the Overton Window recently shifted. You may have noticed.
Here's an example of actual government waste. The ACA provides subsidies for low-deductible health insurance. Those plans are less efficient than high-deductible plans because the plans cost more (to the government and the patient), and because the act of laundering the cost of routine care through an insurance company causes healthcare costs to increase because insurance companies are less price sensitive than patients.
The government does this out of regulatory capture. Health insurance companies don't want people using less expensive plans and health provider companies don't want patients to be price sensitive.
Do you disagree with that? If so we can have a discussion. There is no discussion to be had about whether there should be public roads.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
* https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pay-only-...
Did they really, though? "Have to be" bailed out I mean. They were bailed out, yes, but... just as a thought experiment... perhaps we should have let them go under?
Edit:
Going bankrupt implies either mismanagement, failure to lower cost and increase margins, or the market does not value their service.
If it is the first two, going bankrupt will potentially allow them to sell off their assets to new management who might do a better job. If it is the last one, then they should be shut down.
All the government bailing them out does is prop up bad management and artificially lower prices at the expense of the tax payer having to pay them on the other end. (me paying for half empty train cars even though I haven't ridden a train in years)
Often they weren't bailed out; often their shareholders lost everything or very nearly. Nationalization was more akin to the government picking up the assets in a bankruptcy auction.
I don't think one or the other is strictly better. You point at corruption and waste wherever you find it, then you work to make it less.
- You at least have more than one choice. If the charity you give to performs poorly by whatever metrics you value, you can give to another one next time.
- It is voluntary. Nobody with guns will put you in a cage if you don't donate to a charity, as is the case if you don't pay your taxes.
With charities you can always make your own. Don't have that option in your system.
I'm not American, but aren't some taxes that go to education/welfare/healthcare on a federal level? If so, are you going to tell people to leave the country? It's very expensive and for many practically impossible.
Besides, is the goal not here to spend the money as efficiently as possible? In that case we need as much competition and experimentation as possible. Something I think is achieved to a much higher degree with my system than yours.
Also, your suggestion still doesn't make it voluntary. In my system someone can not donate to charity, but use their money for something else. Charities are not the only way to help the worse off.
Private charities come nowhere near modern government levels of welfare, and never have (that's why we have modern levels of welfare).
It's not as if with government we have more money. So all that matters is efficiency and if a charity is more efficient than a government, why is there no state where you can choose whom to give (at least part of) your taxes?
The fallacy is in imagining it is meaningful to separate money (earned or otherwise) from the system of government it was generated in. Your ability to "earn the money" is fundamentally tied to this system, and if you change one, you change the other necessarily (not a comment on the direction of the delta). Thinking about the economy as a thing that exists on its own, and the government as an institution that just "takes away" from this is just nonsensical.
The statement "It's not as if with government we have more money" is quite likely a category error. After all the ideas of money and the ideas of government are so deeply intertwined in their evolution that people haven't managed to separate them, ahistorical thought experiments in common introductory economics notwithstanding.
For what it's worth, I am sympathetic to some of the arguments you are heading towards, I just object to the sloppy thinking variants of them - which are the most common, unfortunately.
You don't even have to look at history, you can look around the world today with failed states and black markets. Wherever there are people there is economic activity ("earn money"). If there is no state, groups and individuals take upon themselves those roles which the state has monopoly in most places: protection of private property and dispute resolution. These two things are the most vital ingredients for economic activity.
> After all the ideas of money and the ideas of government are so deeply intertwined in their evolution that people haven't managed to separate them
You're just making an unfounded assertion. Many people separate economy and state, for good reason. Money have existed and exist today (cryptocurrencies for one example) irrespective of government.
[edit: I had a longer response but realize it opened up a bunch of side issues that weren't helpful]
The economy and the system of government it operates in (yes, including black/grey markets) are fundamentally intertwined in ways that make it hard to reason about separately.
What I'm objecting to are statements that boil down to: "If we all paid X less tax I would have X more dollars which we could do as we please with". In general this is hopelessly naive.
For what it is worth, both your examples of failed states and cryptocurrrencies (which do not, yet?, operate as currencies) support exactly what I am talking about, not the converse.
The attempt to divide an conquer in thinking about economies and government is useful but so far not completely successful. When it leads to people making silly inferences, it is problematic. So yes people talk about them as if they were separate, because it is easier. But that is not the same as having separated them.
Furthermore, the idea that private charity is inherently more efficient than government is far from self-evident. A basic income policy, for example, could be a far more comprehensive and efficient way of directly addressing poverty than a patchwork of charities targeted specific symptoms of poverty. This is one reason that many pragmatic libertarians are actually favorable toward basic income.
Many states have tax deductions on charitable donations. They're mostly used by wealthy people to shirk their taxes by "donating" to a "charity" that serves their own interests (e.g. "donating" a valuable painting to an "art museum" they establish next door to their house, open only by appointment with them).
Neither does the government, if you measure it that way.
The amount of government money that goes to the homeless or the bottom 5% is fairly modest, because they aren't a large percentage of the population.
Most actual government "welfare" spending is the government taking $5000 from you in taxes and then offering you the $5000 back but only if you submit to their conditions on how to spend it.
By the way, no, the goal here is not to spend the money as efficiently as possible. The primary goal is to succeed at something that is known to improve society as a whole and, perhaps, will allow that society to produce goods better and more effectively. The secondary goal is to do so as efficiently as possible. This is why you don't find much support in countries with nationalized healthcare for abolishing nationalized healthcare; instead, the support is for reforming it or making it more efficient or less corrupt or what have you. The primary goal met, it's on to the secondary goal. Before government was used as a vehicle for achieving many of these things, they simply weren't an option for most.
Government is where we come together as a people and say "yes, this is the cost that we have decided is worth paying in order to have the society that we want". That encompasses both sides---taxes ("what is worth paying") and policy ("how we achieve the society that we want"). Let's grant that there might be less competition and less efficiency (arguable), but there is greater universality, and I would say there are goals where that universality is far more important than the tradeoffs.
In this way, it is the largest form of organized labor. When something is decried for 'inefficiency' we should examine what we are trying to do efficiently. For example, reducing costs of health care by negotiating drug price ceilings as a group in UK/Canada compared to much higher US drug prices as a result of rejecting these policies due to perceived inefficiency. This perception is ideological, in the mind of many Americans market equillibrium is always the most efficient pricing, this measure of efficiency is not related to the amount of healthcare delivered per dollar spent.
The "market is efficient" assumption is voided by the bastardized healthcare system in the US.
In theory the reason we have drug patents is that if you create an important drug, you get a temporary monopoly that you can use to make a lot of money, so people will have the incentive to create important drugs.
The benefit is supposed to be that the market sets the price. Until the patent expires, you pay exactly as much as the drug is worth, no less and no more.
But if the government (or even a large enough insurance company) is paying then there is no market, the buyer has pricing power. The only way the patent system produces the efficiency it's supposed to is if the patient pays for the drugs. Without that you might as well get rid of drug patents and just use tax money to fund drug research directly.
But if you talk about either getting rid of prescription drug coverage or getting rid of drug patents, politics enters and we get the inefficient catastrophe we have.
And there's the rub. You don't, and won't, have that information.
To my knowledge there's one single solitary charity that provides adequate metrics to donors to support this kind of decision and for them it's on principle rather than to open up the market.
Charities as a whole are simply not incentivised to share this kind of information because they compete for funds based on marketing, not efficiency, and there is currently no mechanism to change that.
Yes, there are organisations that audit charities in small numbers and put them on approved lists, but you're still only getting a fading rubber stamp.
> It is voluntary...
He said, casually cutting the funds available for public infrastructure, welfare, health, education and the military by a couple of orders of magnitude.
You can vote out your government.
Charities seem more PR-focused, and the press seems less interested in holding them to account. I have a lot more faith in government to spend money effectively than I do in private charity.
It's exceedingly hard to end an entitlement even if it's clear it doesn't work.
[0] https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/executive_s...
I guess I'm saying I don't mind paying taxes.
I consider the tax rate when choosing how much to charge my customers. I'm sure you do the same when choosing a job. If you paid less in tax, you'd earn less money. Obviously not at a 1:1 ratio, but it's something to keep in mind.
The efficient ones have been the smaller companies in everything from decision making to process. The gov department and large corp are Kafkaesque nightmares where getting an account is a 3 page form and a 5 day SLA.
At the medical startup I was given a laptop and asked for a PR by the end of the day, at the large corp I didn't get a laptop for a week and even then I didn't get logins (yes, logins...) to the code repo for another week.
Governments are inefficent because they are made up of lots and lots of people, same as large companies. Everything needs to be triple checked, rubber stamped and have all people in the chain cover their asses because if anything goes wrong it's very important not to be anyone's fault (but it's definitely someone's fault. This isn't a blame free post mortem here!)
Wait, what? No charities exist that create these organizations? Oh darn, hoist on the reality petard, whatever will we do? Pay taxes you say?! But no, let's just have smaller government! Nevermind that we will have children with lead poisoning, plant workers with cancers, or zero safety net for the elderly, working poor, or disabled. At least I won't be paying taxes!
People are tired of paying for things that they don't agree with. I can't say that I blame them too much.
Americans always say this.
It's still a lot of money but nowhere near what you're implying.
Charities and private businesses actually succumb to corruption, inefficiency, and outright fraud pretty often. How much research do you perform on your charitable contributions versus your taxes? Do you know, off the top of your head, how many cents on the dollar actually support the cause of your favorite charity, and how many are "wasted" on administration?
For in the current system, you broadly have the choice of:
1. Wasting your money on exotic weaponry and wars of expansion whilst starving the populace and enabling a small subpopulation of rich cheaters to dodge their fair societal debt
2. Wasting money on enabling social programs that allow a large subpopulation of poor cheaters to dodge their fair share of societal debt and hinder the rich from buying a second yacht.
I believe South Park refers to this as "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich."
Sadly, in both cases, the upper middle class ends up footing most of the bill.
The past 2 months have illustrated the sort of alternative that can actually get elected here. Do you find this encouraging? I don't.
Go to a 3rd world country and you'll understand what government corruption and waste is.
Or, to quote some famous dead dude: "The World Is a Book and Those Who Do Not Travel Read Only One Page" - St Augustine
Or, to quote Anthony Bourdain himself: “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”
If I say "boy I'm tired today, I only slept 4 hours" and you say "you're tired? I didn't sleep at all!", your being more tired doesn't make me any less tired.
In the same regard, other governments doing a much worse job than the US government doesn't mean that the US government is doing the best job that it can.
But, by all means, go get some billionaire to buy you an island or build one for you to test out your ideal black spherical cow ideas for government. The US itself was once a crazy experiment in cutting edge governing theory itself.
(1) We're not the best, but we are in the top 10% here, no? But I note that everyone who beats us has much smaller populations to satisfy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
The feeling I got after listening to her discuss the obviously broken system for creating of procuring government technology is that people are earnestly trying to produce quality tools, but are forced into ridiculously slow improvement schedules due to the procurement standards and laws.
It talk includes, of course, a call to arms for tech workers to invest in their government by doing a term of service, fixing government by improving its tools.
A few years ago, I wish I still had the link, I read an article detailing exactly that topic and the gist of it pretty much boiled down to: What the US lacks in "welfare state" it makes up trough donations to charities by private citizens, one of the major differences between Europe and the US.
As nice as that might sound, it's also an incentive for the government to keep on cutting spending on social welfare as it assumes the private donations to charities are gonna make up for the difference.
The amount of waste, corruption and poor planning by the gov't [..]
Governments aren't the most efficient organisations around. But Western governments certainly aren't the worst either.
They did this to tick a box for promotion to the next level - not the best use of the share holders money
Yeah, but companies waste their own money. Not mine. Unless I'm a shareholder, I could care less if they flushed cash down the toilet.
[Citation needed.]