Governments will always suck but we need them
atlassquats.com
atlassquats.com
My personal experiences with the government have been either frustrating, inefficient, meaningless, or detrimental. At some point, you inevitably start questioning why such a large government exists and why we need it.
The authors is listing words with very specific negative emotional subtext. It barely makes sense in the context of the sentence.
"The first thing to understand about governments is that governments and corporations are exactly the same. Both are just groups of people trying to create value in some market."
The first thing to understand is generalities can be the death of any reasonable perspective.
The authors use of language betrays the mistake of personifying the government as a cohesive and singular entity.
The truth is that most governments exist as an ecosystem for many different parts to cooperate for various reasons. A very large amount of the people within that ecosystem are genuinely passionate about being able to work for the public good and do a fantastic job of it. A large amount of people within the same ecosystem do not care and take advantage of their civil service role as a means of personal/commercial benefit. Now what about the people in between these archetypes?
The actual "thing" is too varied and complex for almost any generality to be usefully applied.
Saying something is too complicated and varied to reason about is an indictment against all of science. Reality is fractally complicated yet we still manage. Physics is an approximation of reality. Chemisty is an approximation of physics. Biology is an approximation of chemistry. No model is perfect.
In my opinion, understanding government as a monopoly in the business of violence provides a useful framework.
1. It's generalizable. Monopolizing violence over its citizens is the common factor between every government. From North Korea to China to the US to Norway, all governments maintain the absolute and unrivaled power to exert violence over their citizens. I cannot personally find any counterexample.
2. We can apply existing research. Modeling governments as businesses in a specific industry enables to use research about how markets and businesses work. This whole post is essentially an argument to change macroeconomic modeling. Instead of treating the government as some separate special entity, we can simply existing macroeconomics models by treating the government as yet another business.
3. It's simple.