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I don't understand how we continually believe the governments know how to spend money better, HN is littered with examples of government projects that have been woefully inefficient with the money they've taken.

> I don't understand how we continually believe the governments know how to spend money better, HN is littered with examples of government projects that have been woefully inefficient with the money they've taken.

This is of course true, but the opposite it true as well. Regardless, this misses the point. The reason people want public interest spending to be conducted by the government is that, with government spending, there is at least some opportunity for democratic (i.e. public) oversight. With private spending, there is only oversight from invested parties.

At the risk of sounding snarky, if the oversight worked there wouldn't be all these stories.

Look at the F35 thread that appears here now and again. Loads and loads of congressional districts involved, loads and loads of people with a stake. It still ended up costing an insane amount more than it needed to.

With private actually I don't think it's all that different though, the difference is some of the private ventures are allowed to die once the failure is complete.

Totally agree that public interest ought to matter, just I don't see that it actually holds people to account.

> with government spending, there is at least some opportunity for democratic (i.e. public) oversight. With private spending, there is only oversight from invested parties.

There's an argument that you get the same dynamic either way. In political science it's the problem of "concentrated benefits and diffused costs". Only "invested parties" pay for lobbyists (e.g., Intuit/Turbotax). Others (e.g., everyone who does taxes once a year) find it easier/"cheaper" to put up with the annoyance than to exercise "oversight".

If you actually read my comment, it should be clear that I don’t think governments know how to spend money better.

I'm not sure this is true, except that you are comparing the worst of government projects with the best of corporate projects.

Most businesses fail. Hell, most Google products have failed. As such, overall private spending is woefully inefficient (despite a few big successes), and government spending is relatively very efficient.

That's an extraordinary take on the matter.

Governments have the ability to tax in order to fund spending.

Businesses have to fund their spending out of either their revenues or their debt/equity funding. Is it any wonder that businesses fail more often than governments?

If the measure of government efficiency is return on the tax dollar, then by the same yardstick the benefits generated by most businesses are infinitely efficient.

My point was to observe that:

- first, government spending is highly scrutinised, by the convention that people expect every tax dollar to be spent in a way that they deem worthy;

- whereas, most private businesses are not scrutinised in any sort of comparable way (often not even when they are spending tax dollars - which they can, directly and indirectly).

I'd propose remove every form of regressive taxation and allow the individual to keep more of the wealth they've earned.

Remove: Sales Tax, Punitive Fines, Import Taxes, Stamp Duties

Keep: Income tax (even raise it if you want)

Add: Held wealth tax (if you want, or go full progressive and replace income with this)

Here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine a government uses tax payer money to install a bench in the park. This bench has a distinguished businessman’s name brazened on the front of it, and this bench is poorly placed and no one sits in it, providing no utility to society. In this example, the public has every right to be disgruntled, they can call their representatives, media organizations etc., or just talk about the stupidity and incompetence of their government and vote new, equally incompetent, people in their place instead. When a government does something like this, it’s not working right.

Imagine the park is owned by a private nonprofit. The business man donates money to the nonprofit to install the bench, the business man gets a dollar for dollar tax deduction on the bench, and the nonprofit rewards him by having his name put on the bench. No one uses the bench and it provides no utility.

In either case, the real results for society is the same. The only difference is that for the nonprofit case the system works the way it’s supposed to.

In real life what you get is that moneyed elites get a boost in status from their donations. How can you demand demand good behavior from people with no accountability?

> There are always multiple perspectives- is Zuck finding a disadvantaged community in Africa and providing training to help them get higher paying jobs that what they could have gotten otherwise? Yes. Is Zuck’s charity creating a pool of programming labor that Facebook will be able to take advantage of and pay much lower than what they would have to pay for a programmer in the USA? Also yes. Does it make Zuck’s charity bad if it is also self serving? I don’t know.

Will those qualifications be good for anything else than Facebook? Will Zuck support that the pay grade eventually rises to the same level as developed countries or will he try to keep it down? What kind of quality of life and health hazards do those newly created jobs entail?

Regarding Facebook, I remember the whole scandal about "content moderators". Facebook's solution to content moderation was as follows: Create thousands of clickworker jobs in the Philippines and similar countries with ultra-low wages and no worker protection. Each "moderator" was effectively a factory worker who was presented by Facebook's software with a steady stream of reprehensible and horrifying images and posts. They had to decide for each instance whether or not it violated Facebook's TOS under time tracking.

No useful skills that are useful outside of that job, no potential for promotion or to make a career, serious risk of trauma and other mental health problems. But hey, jobs!

> Does it make Zuck’s charity bad if it is also self serving?

If you're financing something for self-serving reasons, then by definition, you aren't being charitable (caritas). If you can prove it, then perhaps tax exemptions should be removed. Rich people already exploit too many loopholes as it is.

> But is it fair that Bill Gates gets to decide what research gets funded from him when there are a bunch of worthy projects that won’t make the cut simply because they aren’t one of Bill’s pet interests?

Putting aside Gates for a second, there is no charity without a free act. If I am to act charitably, I must freely do so. There is no such thing as compelled or forced charity. Now, if there is a charity that does certain things and that decides how its funds are allocated, it should be transparent about that, and those who give are therefore consenting freely to fund those things. (Incidentally, this is why individual megadonors can be dangerous because charities can become dependent on them if they're not careful and subsequently allow themselves to be pressured by those donors to do what they want. The same is true of government funding. Many organizations, like universities, have been corrupted by the strings attached to such funding, esp. given that the conditions can change.)

In Gates' case, he has a foundation, yes, so it's his. So if he is funding _morally licit_ (and thus bona fide) charitable projects, then that's his free choice (I, of course, don't hold that to be the case; Gates is funding morally abhorrent causes as well). You can try to _persuade_ him to fund other things, of course.

> another side of me says that money should be taxed and a committee of experts should decide

The composition of that committee will determine the way money is distributed, and the differences will be radically different. I do believe in the morally objective, but practically speaking, we are very divided today about basic moral truths, so I would rather leave it up to private citizens. My only concern are rich donors who can single-handedly shape society with their money. However, I am not sure what we can really do about it, realistically.

I would have thought that the Gates foundation was an excellent example of how to spent money well: after an enormous amount of research on determining what problems are priorities, and the most efficient (in terms of bang per buck) ways to fix them. I think it is probably best to not look at it through a capitalist or libertarian lens, and actually look at where the money is going, what it is doing, and how effectively it is doing it.

> I would have thought that the Gates foundation was an excellent example of how to spent money well

Spending money on research and development programs with beneficial public health outcomes sounds good, unless you are a non-Gates backed researcher who has been working in the field for a long time and loses access to clinical facilities, data, and competitive grant funding because you get usurped by an organisation that has more political and economic influence than your NGO.