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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

> can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid.

Yes, exactly this. Not "can provide the aid", but "first to the punch". You really hit the nail on the head.

The morality of massive wealth accumulation -- and the morality of various mechanisms for changing that accumulation -- is definitely something that reasonable people can have a polite and respectable debate about.

But it is absolutely unacceptable that wealthy individuals are beating government to the punch in disaster relief and preparedness. COVID-19 is the dry run, and the USA has absolutely failed on such a profound level that we should have actual existential concerns about how broken our government has become (and there's plenty of blame to go around).

I really hope the outcome is "competent government, regardless of size, and sabotaging implementation is treasonous" as a bipartisan consensus.

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Is this really that surprising? Governments' advantage is crafting certain kinds of incentives that markets can't, but it's pretty much a guarantee that government will be more incompetent at whatever specific task they put their mind to, in large part because of the burden of democratic accountability. Conditioned on the resources and incentives being centralized (in Brin), why wouldn't you expect his organization to be more competent?

Yes, the poor performance of the US government in COVID-19 is astounding and unique among governments. In no small part due to exactly this attitude.

The US Government was the first institution in the world to put a man on the moon. A half century before the libertarian corporatism figured out the market incentives to merely put stuff into low orbit. Which even communism figured out a half century ago.

And even now the lead investor is government, because both public and private equity is too chicken-shit to lead investment in even tried-and-true tech when the dollar amounts get too big.

Excellence in government is possible. There is no magic "gub'mit" pixie dust which makes that institution by fiat incompetent.

Governments and businesses are just collections of people doing stuff. Getting all religious about the difference between the two is counter-productive. The question here is one of utilitarian division of responsibility.

And, btw, capitalists didn't save the day on COVID-19 in the USA either. 120K+ dead and growing. We failed the dry run.

> democratic accountability

That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction.

There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.

The USA sure seems to have a lot of mysterious problems that people throw up their hands as utterly unfixable, that no other country in the world does.

Because we're a massive, layered,diverse federal system. It's blindingly ignorant to suggest that the US has a literally uniquely dysfunctional government: other countries with categorically similar levels of diversity and scale (India, Brazil) face many of the same problems. And polities that have these characteristics in part face these problems in proportion: the EU is another source of signal here.

European govt's stability and relatively cohesive civic cultures come after centuries of world-spanning bloodbaths, genocides and ethnic cleansing to reach the status quo of relatively tiny, relatively ethnically homogeneous states. And there are plenty of dark sides to this cohesion as well.

This is definitely not true. A huge factor in govt inefficiency is that nonpartisan competence is completely irrelevant to most voters, who process policies based on what partisan hackery they pattern-match to most easily. This means govt institutions get jerked around by bizarre constraints and lack of constraints that can be traced back to the fact that they're ultimately accountable to voters.

If Congresspeople and similar desk jockeys can't chronically profit from ensuring our preparedness for disasters, well, don't expect them to do so.

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