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Comment by thebradbain | Hacker News Reader

It's not the ideas that are wrong. Most people who know of its benefits aren't against high speed rail! It's the government's own execution consistently getting in the way of its plans. It's that the layers of bureaucracy in such a big state get in the way of governing - I'd argue California's state government is closer to the Federal Government in practice than, say, Kansas' state government.

At some point a cell becomes too big to perform its vital functions on its own. I'd argue in many cases the same is true of government. Hence why California has municipal governments which do more than most states' state governments. Human government isn't Java; we can't just keep abstracting away core functions and not lose efficiency and context in the handoff.

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> Inefficiency and lack of centralization in government may have indeed been a plan of the US government that worked at its founding, but at some point we have to re-evaluate and find a balance between decentralization and efficiency.

This one thing I've thought about. People seem to assume it's bureaucracy within government that's the issue when really it's bureaucracy among government.

At a minimum there's Federal, State, County, Municipal. Then you might have other specially formed districts for transportation or whatnot. There's no "the government". There's many governments and trying to get them all to agree on a coordinated plan for anything beyond the status quo seems next to impossible. The Bay Area is a perfect example of this. It's all one region. For all intents and purposes municipalities are pointless. It's just one giant organism. But some counties didn't want to join BART, some are more NIMBY, some don't want to construct housing, and so on.

Could anybody familiar with other better functioning countries maybe compare this system to one that is known to work better?

I am to understand what you are saying is that it’s not the idea that government should be involved in everything, it’s that the government needs to be larger and more centralized?

Moreso the idea that, whenever trying to do something new (e.g. building a high speed rail), the layers of bureaucracy get in the way of themselves. There's too many governments that are more often opposed to each other than in agreement.

The state's individuals overwhelmingly approved the HSR in referendum in 2007(!), yet local governments and counties tripped over themselves trying to sue the state and delay and kill this project. I would argue that, in extraordinary circumstances, the state's power should be able to override local powers: something like, this is a state-level project, so your local jurisdiction is limited. The case here is local powers holding the rest of the state hostage.

California's government is great at maintaining the status quo, but trying to get local municipalities to implement a change in unison (building more housing, etc.) is like pulling teeth. That leads to cost overruns, delays, and the general sort of inefficiency we associate with government.

More specifically that institutions of government with larger jurisdiction should have more capability and institutions with smaller jurisdiction should have less capability. It isn’t about the amount of power that government as a whole has, but the distribution of it. It is better to centralize power in a central institution to maximize efficiency and enable anti-corruption watchdogs to concentrate their attention.

>More specifically that institutions of government with larger jurisdiction should have more capability and institutions with smaller jurisdiction should have less capability.

But not overhead and bureaucracy?

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