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It's more than just a jobs program too. It's a reelection plan for senators/house members.

Look at what states and districts get these big DoD contracts and then look at what committees the congressmen/women are sitting on.

They approve plans that benefit them then direct the funds right into their districts so they can campaign on it.

I mean it's not the worst form of corruption but it's pretty shitty when you realize how our infrastructure and defense is designed around congressional districts instead of what is best for our country.

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But imagine if we put people to work building useful stuff instead of useless stuff. Power grid infrastructure, new bridges, new rail lines, etc.

Why do you think the current prioritization exists?

The cynic in me thinks it has to do with power projection and the economy.

The less cynical part of me wonders if it’s related to a cognitive bias that over-weights threats from rival “tribes” and the need to ensure stability

Fear of terrorists sells better than fear of ice storms.

Especially for the states (and representatives) that the ice storm is 100 year. Dams fail, and when they fail, they don't affect the people that didn't want to live near a dam.

So is it the “randomness” of terrorism that causes us to overweight the risk?

It seems like we’re just really bad at thinking clearly about low probability / high severity risks

The directness of terrorism causes us to overweight the risk.

The dam flooding isn't random, its an unfrequent event that will occur so it is something we should prepare for.

I’ve often wondered if it’s a similar incentive misalignment with executives and politicians that helps ignore these low frequency events.

CEOs are graded quarter-to-quarter and politicians every 2-4 years. Low probability events (plane crashes, infrastructure failures, etc.) may not ever happen during their tenure, incentivizing them to defund preparing for them to favor other programs, understanding full well they’re bound to occur

Bruce Schneider article claims people fear terrorism disproportionately to the risk because it is intentional and directed https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparati...

Not only that, it is the whole point of terrorism, to trigger psychological bugs in humans relating to risk assessment.

*schneier

Boring! How am I supposed to get reelected and campaign contributions without cool dream pictures? Infrastructure is just something you say, Pork is what you do.

I think this is really insightful. Misallocation of resources is what eventually brings down economies. There are lots of bright people around, but corruption can drain a lot of talent.

Perhaps the problem is that the government has too much of a role in allocating resources in our economy as it stands. Maybe the military-industrial complex had some cool things for the first couple decades of its existence, but as the decades went on, it became a rusty, slower version of its old self as bureaucratic creep and complacency set in. Now it seems hard to disrupt that, like what tends to happen in the non-monopolized private sector.

The elephant in the room is that military budget has to keep going up ("support the troops", create jobs and satisfy lobbyists) but there is no good goal to work towards. Great things happened in the 1940s to 70s because there were clear enemies and clear steps to take to gain and keep superiority. Today the US has a military budget three times bigger than that of the next largest spender, and everything necessary to fulfill the current challenges already exists and is in operation. So you spend the rest to prepare for the future, but with no external pressure to do so fast or efficiently.

Lots of us would love to believe this, and yet what does the unrestrained private sector churn out? Ad networks, app addiction, gig economy, throwaway culture, urban sprawl, climate apathy... hardly a winner.

SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do.

I don't think the private sector is ever going to do ambitious things like build rail infrastructure all on its own, nor is the current PPP model necessarily the way either, but maybe there is some option out there to get things done which looks like the bakeoff that NASA held with CRS.

> SpaceX ... surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do

Really this is more similar to VC investment where NASA funded it so they could get a return (better launches), but the future is that a probably large percentage of launches will be for commercial purposes (~50% of 2022 launches are for Starlink).

> SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA

In 2020, SpaceX did 26 launches. Only six of those had NASA as a customer. The rest were a mix of US military, commercial customers, foreign governments (Argentina and South Korea), and Starlink. Even if you add up NASA and US military, that's still only nine out of 26 with the US government as the customer.

So while no doubt SpaceX does benefit from NASA's business, it is now only a minority.

Sure, and legacy launch providers do business with the private sector also, but none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime.

There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."

> There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."

SpaceX was funded by Elon Musk and later, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. Starlink has been in part funded by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity. And since then further funding rounds have been raised.

The DFJ and Founder's Fund investment was before SpaceX had any substantial NASA development contracts, let along their 2008 $1.6 billion launch contract.

Interesting, though I don't know if any of that really disproves my point. Musk's own money was a self-investment; he didn't need to pitch anyone for that. Jurvetson was involved with Tesla prior, and Thiel was obviously connected through PayPal.

Until the Dragon demo flights in 2012-2013, I think SpaceX would have been hard pressed to raise significant capital from anyone other than Elon's friends. I think the fact that so many private space companies have one or more wealthy benefactors bears this out (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo to a lesser extent).

There's a wide gulf between "only a few people with the right skills and personal connections can bootstrap a space company" and "none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime"

The missing bits is that they bootstrapped after a lot of heavy lifting was done on public dime, and then landed a crucial bunch of govt contracts way before first succesful draco launch, the same kind of contracts that the previous private contractors also take.

I'd love to come up with examples as I type this to you from an open source web browser on a smart phone that contains more functionality than $20K worth of equipment did with more processing power than what all of NASA had in the 70s and access to more information than President Reagan had in the 80s and a faster throughput than anyone had in the 90s all hosted on a self made website by a startup platform helped fund and inspire hundreds of successful companies as I wait for my sushi dinner to be delivered to my door and take a break from my telecommute to work to hack out this absent minded response to you, but I'm drawing a blank.

Another Musk inspired project is the hyperloop and of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars. These are novel transportation solutions that solve for the problem in a more creative way than simply "build more light rails". That's the type of stuff a government will never come up with. There needs to be a creative maestro with massive capital. Musks are rare in the world but they certainly can move in a more agile way when they do appear.

I would also argue, telecommuting has solved for some of the transportation problems alone. Think of how many less cars are on the road as a result of work from home.

The thing that's different between Boring/Hyperloop and SpaceX is that SpaceX's entire business case is built on the cost benefit of landing and reusing a rocket, an idea for which the napkin math was obvious and in the end turned out to be extremely feasible but which legacy providers had been unwilling to even try.

Boring/Hyperloop don't have an idea like this. Boring's pitch is using conventional TBMs but making it cheaper by digging a smaller-diameter tunnel than the other guy. Does that meet the requirements? New subway systems are also reducing tunnel diameter by using LRVs instead of heavy rail cars... is there an actual innovation here?

Hyperloop is full of practicality issues, and addresses none of the real problems that are barriers to high speed mass transit projects today— specifically the fights over rights of way and station locations. The fact that it was initially pitched in 2013 as a system for moving around private automobiles should tell you a lot about how much understanding there is of the first principles of transportation— it wasn't until years later that this was acknowledged and corrected [1]. It would be like someone proposing an airline where each plane carries 10 cars instead of 400 passengers ("so convenient, you just drive right on board!")— it doesn't matter how fast the trains are, 840 passengers per hour for a Hyperloop would be a complete nonstarter when a normal subway does 40k/hr.

Maybe Boring/Hyperloop will end up pivoting into something worthwhile, but at the moment there is good reason for skepticism.

[1]: https://www.masstransitmag.com/technology/news/12402366/elon...

> The thing that's different between Boring/Hyperloop and SpaceX is that SpaceX's entire business case is built on the cost benefit of landing and reusing a rocket, an idea for which the napkin math was obvious and in the end turned out to be extremely feasible but which legacy providers had been unwilling to even try.

The cost of reusing a rocket has not been proven to be cheaper than building a new rocket. Consider factors like the inability to reuse the entire rocket, the reduced payload. At best you can break even. Unless you somehow reuse the entire rocket and do 100 flights with the same rocket the savings are meager.

This isn't something new. The space shuttle suffered from the same issues. Building new shuttles was almost the same cost and less risky.

I think it's pretty obvious that the current gen F9s are way more reusable and with way less refurbishment than the Shuttle ever was, even with the disposable second stage. But yeah, there are limitations, which is part of why FH is effectively cancelled in favour of just flying those payloads on a disposable booster.

But now that the basic principle has been proven, really leaning into it is part of the point of Starship— a new clean sheet design that is built for full reusability from the get go.

Cars themselves are pretty wasteful in terms of space and the way they rearrange the urban landscape. The concept of the Boring tunnel actually sounds like someone in 1894 wanting better spaces for horse carriages, except even more wasteful in this case.

>Another Musk inspired project is the hyperloop

He just took the 100 year old vac train concept and repackaged it. Back in his original pitch he constantly said and laughed how easy it is. Once the years went by he slowly backed off from every promise and ultimately reduced his involvement to 0.

> of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars.

He promised to make tunnel boring cheaper, yet his only tunnel costs exactly as much as every other tunnel. He constantly advertises 150mph travel when the tunnel isn't even long enough to reach that speed. Have you seen the tunnel? It's so tiny you can't even open your doors if you get stuck in there. If even a single car fire starts in that tunnel everyone in the tunnel will die.

That would be communism, and we can't have that.

The reason why the USA uses the military as a jobs program is that it's the only thing that gets bipartisan support.

Communism does an even worse job of allocating resources.

Communism had a great many failings, but they did allocate a lot of money to infrastructure and science.

But what real communism did isn't even relevant here, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about imaginary communism in the sense that anything that is good for the general population is somehow called communism in US politics.

I've never heard anyone call free markets communism.

Emission trading schemes get called communist plots quite regularly.

It's a market for garbage disposal. How is that not capitalist?

I presume the parent poster is referring to things like housing cost assistance (called Section 8 in the US), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), social security, Medicare/Medicaid government assisted health coverage programs, disability financial assistance programs and other socioeconomic-hardship assistance programs.

Not to mention funding schools, universities, or government research grants.

That's among the things that get called communism or socialism here in the US.

The government providing a product or service is socialism. The public school system certainly qualifies as socialism.

The entire point of a government is to provide services; including but not limited to transport infrastructure, contract dispute settlement (civil courts), protection of life and property (police, criminal justice system, sewers, firefighting, public health, etc.) and education. If all of that is socialism then I don't know a country that isn't socialist. Maybe Somalia in the 90s. Of course words can mean whatever we want, but that definition doesn't sound useful.

> The entire point of a government is to provide services

Of course. That doesn't mean the services it provides aren't socialism. For a country on balance to be socialist, more than have of its goods and services would need to be provided by the government.

> that definition doesn't sound useful.

It's exactly what socialism is:

"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."

The first definition when googling "definition of socialism". Government is the means by which the community effects socialism.

The entire point of government is to prevent coercion.

In any economic system political aspects have a tendency to reduce the information available to consumers and producers. This is often done with laudable intent leading to terrible outcomes. In Soviet Communism the information feedback loop was so disconnected it resembled the theory of an AI "paperclip apocalypse"[1].

From 0:

The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products.

Whaling, like every other industry in the Soviet Union, was governed by the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, a government organ tasked with meting out production targets. In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy, whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry. This meant that the progress of the whaling fleets was measured by the same metric as the fishing fleets: gross product, principally the sheer mass of whales killed.

0. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...

1. https://voxeu.org/article/ai-and-paperclip-problem

The real solution involves a hybrid system where the government supports a baseline of services. Mostly food, water, shelter, electricity, roads, etc. The private sector's responsibility is to provide superior service above and beyond what the government is doing.

Pure communists think that the government baseline should be enough for everyone, even if it means inferior service.

Pure capitalists think that superior service should be enough for everyone, even if it is unaffordable.

The obvious answer is to find the middle ground and reap the benefits of both.

I personally don't think that the F-35 is falling into that. A jobs program fighter jet doesn't really make sense since it is not a long term investment with a direct return. It's more of an insurance policy against an imaginary foe. Yes, you have jets but unless you use them to conquer land or defend yourself there is no direct return on investment.

>real solution involves a hybrid system where the government supports a baseline of services

As Inread that I think: basic services are too important to miss the feedback loop and become the equivalent of universal low grade government cheese. At the same time, maybe the poor quality of government provided baseline goods and services would incentivize people to attain better, which is an improvement over direct subsidies which act like high marginal taxes when they are reduced in response to income growth. Unfortunately a significant number of basic needs are commodities, such as cheese, and are subject to mismeasure and goal seeking instead of value seeking, similar to the Soviet whaling industry of the 1960s/70s.

The F-35: similar to SLS and Soviet whalers, political considerations are weighted higher than value ones. The F-35 also has the challenge of being developed at a transitional period, in the late morning of a period that will be marked by low observability, human optionality, and high speed and precision impact. The F-35s story isn’t over yet and like other troubled weapons systems there is a lower than likely chance it may blossom like the M-16. It has already passed the Sgt York stage and is in the a state where like the BFV it will find its place within doctrine and eventually battle, or not. I think it is too soon to tell.

If communism allocated resources effectively, communist economies would be powerhouses instead of third-world.

how were those countries economies before communism?

Better in every case. And better after communism ended, in every case.

Look at it another way. Which countries have walls to keep people out? And which have walls to keep people in?

Walls and bullets too, don't forget that. Communists were not shy to kill their own people looking to escape the "wonders" of their system.

Barbed wire on the borders, bullets shot without warning at swimmers trying to cross freezing rivers, then families held hostage and tortured to punish and warn escapees - oh Communism was such an awesome experience, I can only wish it from the bottom of my heart to all its apologists.

Some years back a socialist told me that the Berlin Wall was to keep westerners out of East Berlin. I told him that I'd visited the Wall in 1969, passed through it and had a tour of East Berlin, seen the Wall museum, been on the platforms overlooking the wall, had East German guards wave at me, etc.

In a sense it is both good and bad that the Wall has been erased, people forget what it was like. Nobody should forget.

Nice propaganda there, most post soviet countries still havent recovered. Hell i aint a communist but most of these countries did better under communism if only because the US wasnt there to leech off them

> most of these countries did better under communism

Communists killed local population by millions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_state...

Outside of events like these countries that adopted communism had higher standards of living while they didnt

> Outside of events like these

Crimes against humanity ain’t a minor issue you can ignore. Directly related to communism. Democratic states don’t do that, communist regimes did that a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity_under_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...

> had higher standards of living while they didn’t

That’s debatable. Might be true in 1910-1920, but by the end of the last century all communist states with planned economy have failed their economies, catastrophically so, with direct consequences on standards of living. China’s the only exception, were lucky to have smart enough people in power to pivot towards market economy, and execute it relatively well.

No worse than capitalism does.

The point is that having a government jobs program to build infrastructure has absolutely nothing to do with communism.

Defence equipment isn’t useless. In the event of war it becomes essential. Spending has to continue on these programmes in peacetime to retain capability.

War with Canada or Mexico?

Failed stealth fighter programs are quite useless.

You actually make a great point, even if the money has to go to defense and not other purposes, it should still be useful for the purpose of defense.

Grid infrastructure and rail lines jump to my mind often in these discussions.

I am reminded how we got existing rail line through much of the U.S. 19th century land acquisition for private parties who built that infrastructure is easy to spin as a travesty. In many cases it was blatant corruption. And the legacy lasts to this day. All of that land and infrastructure is still privately owned.

Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?

There used to be some idea that the government should not compete with private industry. That idea is much murkier more recently.

But if you want to build public infrastructure to compete with the likes of Union Pacific, shouldn't you start by nationalizing the likes of Union Pacific?

See also USPS for more interesting examples of public vs private enterprise. Imagine that the USPS contracted local delivery and long-haul transfer. Imagine that a local mom and pop could bid on a local contract. Newspaper delivery bicycle contractors everywhere could double their money for little additional effort. Or FedEx/UPS/Amazon might really sharpen their pencils and win those contracts.

Re: USPS, I’m still waiting to hear the interesting part.

The USPS is legally obligated to deliver mail to every household, 6 days a week. The private carriers don’t come anywhere close to meeting that level of service. Most of the US is incredibly sparsely populated. There won’t be bicycle contractors lining up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks or across the Great Plains.

How would a network of private interests handing off parcels between each other under government regulation deliver better service than a single organization with the problem already solved thanks to 200 years of domain expertise?

This isn't an argument for privatization, but the proposal from the OP are not the same as full an open free market. You still have the USPS responsible for ensuring delivery to the long-tail routes. That just gets bid out (probably at a higher cost that delivery occurs for today). These are the kinds of bids companies like Halliburton take.

I'm not in favor of this approach, either we have a really free market (with some limited regulation for things like anti-fraud) or you have the government manage the service. These public-private partnerships just seem to be grift programs write large. Let's not push for more corporatism. If there is already a private market, then sure, have the government bid for private contracts within that market. Otherwise you have companies whose full-time roles is figure out how to squeeze more money out of government, and they lobby hard to do so, often with much success (at filching taxpayers)

The USPS does not deliver mail to every household. Nor do they deliver universally six days a week.

Where I live, USPS doesn't deliver to any household, but UPS and FedEx do.

But that is beside the point. Any party that contracted with the USPS would be obligated to meet the terms of the contract.

You might be surprised at who lines up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks. One of the virtues of a free market is the amazing ingenuity of entrepreneurs to meet market demand in the most efficient ways. The free market provides the motivation for such ingenuity whereas non-profit single-player monopolies often don't.

But still this misses my interest in this discussion. I think there is an optimum balance for publicly-owned infrastructure and privately-owned service providers. But that balance is not always obvious and usually not stable. I think there is great benefit in continuous discussion of the pros and cons to monitor and adjust how we leverage the strengths of both sides of the equation.

I like the idea of "build more rail lines." But it takes more that four words to make this happen. If you are just trying to replace the pork of military spending, then perhaps the details don't matter. Just trade one corruption for another. Let the power brokers beat each other up clamoring for the money.

But if you're making such radical changes to the redistribution of wealth, why not have some thoughtful discussion that people can reference for the next 100s of years. Who are the Lockes and Keynes of 2021? I know they exist. Let's bring them out in public discussion.

But all these companies need a government that does compete with them the moment they stop innovating and start rent seeking, it's really best for them.

USPS does do contracts for transfers and some local routes.

>Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with building public infrastructure considering in many cases the infrastructure in question would form a natural monopoly. However, car manufacturers, grocers, textile factories have lots of competition. Those markets are very healthy.

American ISPs fail to provide good service even in wealthy locations. Google had to stop their gigabit fiber rollout. That's definitively a failing market where a baseline of service should be provided by governments. Private companies can always provide superior service and charge for it.

That's what "pork" means.

Just to expand on this a bit: "pork" as in "pork barrel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel

Or "stimulus" if you want to cast positive light on it.

That’s sort of a broken window fallacy. A direct stimulus doesn't take away people’s time and materials producing things that nobody wants.

It's not an accident that you'll find some manufacturer in the F-35's supply chain in basically every US state.

The interesting thing is that it seems to be an unfixable and systemic problem. You could have someone come in and try to clean it up but then they'd face the backlash of the entire system that has been built on and benefited from the corruption.

Exactly... this is in fact the overall problem with the US government. Start by fixing that, and then the smaller systems like military procurement that depend on corruption higher up will become fixable.

How can we create new incentives to discourage this behavior and to encourage infrastructure projects that provide jobs as well as create superlinear value?

We did: pork spending was mostly outlawed in 2011 (the F-35 dates from way before that). But as it turns out, the cure was almost as bad as the disease. Getting rid of pork has accelerated hyper-partisanship and dysfunctional gridlock, because without it there's no incentive to ever try to reach a deal with the other side instead of digging in on no-compromise radicalism to please your base.

> pork spending was mostly outlawed in 2011

Is there a longer discussion of this that you can link somewhere? I remember the phrase as a derogatory commonplace in adults' political discussion when I was a child, but the concept seems to have drifted out of the discourse since, and having now had my attention drawn to its absence I'd be interested to find out more about why.

There's definitely still pork. I mean, look at how many pet projects were included in Covid relief funding. Pork is the idea of stuffing an unrelated project to benefit your local district or state (and thus, the politician's reelection chances) into a bigger bill that is unrelated to that expense. Like the most famous one was the Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" that would have cost $400 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge

That dates to 2005, so you are not really contradicting grandparent's point that this was mostly outlawed in 2011 (and that this has accelerated hyperpartisanship by removing an incentive for compromise).

Grandparent never pointed to what law they were talking about. They just made an offhanded, unverified remark. I also pointed out that a lot superfluous pork was included in Covid funding. "Pork" was never outlawed. It's not even a formally defined thing. If you think politicians can't figure out how to wiggle pet projects into huge multi trillion dollar spending bills then you really ought to tune into C-Span more often.

What pet projects in Covid relief funding are you talking about?

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/531294-congresss-pork-fi...

This is the outdated proposal that didn't pass. But the current proposal is double this. I've tried to tune out politics for a while but you can be sure that pork is in a $1.9 trillion spending bill as sure as the sun rises.

OK, thanks for making it clear that you don't know whether the bill contains pork or not.

I believe you refer to a specific method of appropriations called "earmarks" which are often synonymous with pork barrel spending.

https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/senate-dems-give-in-o...

Plus one state's useful new spending is 49 states' pork, meaning that it's always easy to label anything as being evidence of government waste and corruption. But earmarks served as a useful way for states to get federal involvement in local issues that otherwise would never see the light of day, so their loss not only reduced the ability to get major things done, but also to get even tiny things done.

Earmarks are supposedly coming back this year though.

I don't think it is possible to discourage federal contracts being awarded to the benefit of a particular state. If a state is home to a company with the expertise to complete a project the contract can't just be awarded to a another state that doesn't.

The best we could do is change the way contract funding is performed. Cost-plus pricing without an upper bound is a huge issue. This type of contract encourages bidders to bid low on cost and make up for it with project extensions.

Of course cost-plus is preferred by bidders as they can guarantee a minimum of profit since cost is already covered. However, fixed price contracts are better from the perspective of the government spending. The spend is known up front. It is up to the bidders to determine if they can make a profit or not.

Ideally the government shouldn't care if the bidder is making a profit. It is their duty to spend public funds frugally. Cost-plus makes it impossible to reign in contract spending without terminating the contract.

The easiest answer is probably public financing of elections.

Because Members of Congress basically need to continuously raise money, there’s always an incentive to spread the wealth among congressional districts.

For the F35, I can think of one company in a rural area who fabricates some metal component for the project. Because of the way it is contracted, acceptance standards, etc they sell it for something like 50x it’s value of you were to order it, and whomever gets the part spends even more to receive it.

Planes are small and have lots of parts, so they suffer more from these issues. We’re still ok at building warships, because you can’t build a shipyard in some coal town in Kentucky.

Public financing would help as a component with corporate lobbyists but pork barrels wouldn't be affected. I use the term with a slight distinction - pork barrels are for parochial voter influnce while an "industrial complex" involves a company's interest in exchange for political benefits. The two may overlap if what helps the company also gets votes in itself. A stereotypical but perhaps unfair example of both (as I am uncertain of actual lobbying in the period) would be Detroit in its heyday - it would have a sizeable base of factory workers locally and large connected auto companies.

The problem of pork barrels is that it gets them votes directly by making things worse for everybody else in exchange for local benefits. Disproportionate representation is what enables it as a tactic or at least makes it more disastrous. Something which serves the interests of 30% of the population is closer to benefitting the whole than one for 3% of the population.

I would agree that it isn't magic. Keep in mind that one man's pork is another's bacon. Pork is part of the political process.

In the modern environment, material pork barrel spending is at the corporate/national level. Most congressional districts due to gerrymandering or demographics are very secure... the era of political machines handing out turkeys is gone.

If the craven corruption around defense contracting was only 80% as wasteful as it is today, you could give every member of congress a substantial slush fund to waste and still save money. Plus you would have working fighter jets that are able to compete with countries like Russia, that has a GDP equivalent to Texas but seems to be able to procure weapons.

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