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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> And people wonder why there is staunch support for less government involvement. At least when I get screwed over by a private company I can talk to someone...so long as it's not Google.

I don't bother wondering why people are ignorant anymore, some things just are. You get a vote simply by existing as a citizen and can put effort into changing government. Businesses can tell you to pound sand unless you're a shareholder or management. Government can be held accountable (caveats such as Venezuela and Somalia aside), businesses less so.

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Boiling this down to biz vs gov is a false dichotomy.

There's some fundamental "usability" spectrum aligned with "optional-ness" vs "mandatory-ness". Equifax, Experian, Trans Union, etc have some of the worst customer service of all time. They make egregious errors and are not held accountable. My experiences with the DMV (another semi-mandatory service) pale in comparison with those 3 companies.

Of all the bad experiences I've had, it almost always comes down to "Do I have other options and how easy is it to opt-out?". The harder it is to opt-out, the worse my experience has been.

The customer for the credit bureaus is not you.

It's the same for most semi-to-fully-mandatory interactions. I don't get anything from the DMV. I pay to give information.

But you're not arguing for/against my main point: That it's not a biz-vs-gov problem, it's a mandatory-vs-optional problem.

You can walk away from a business. The government can legally shoot you if you refuse to comply long enough.

You can't walk away from Equifax. I can walk away from my drivers license.

> "Government can be held accountable"

LOL. I remember when the city of Philadelphia flooded my house because they were doing some work on a neighboring structure. COP's response "We have a law that says the City of Philadelphia cannot be held accountable or sued for their actions". As Mel Brooks once put it, "its good to be the King".

There are similar laws in some locales that offer similar levels of protection to malfeasance by private firms.

The fundamental difference between the relationship between individuals and businesses and individuals and government is that one is voluntary, the other is not. Businesses need customers to survive, it is a very powerful motivator to providing good products and customer service if people are free to do business with someone else instead. Rapid changes in consumer habits, usually due to new options becoming available, have doomed many incumbents. Government agencies don't need you, you need them through force of the law.

Even if you are an employee, it's a voluntary relationship. If you feel you're not being treated fairly, you can try to complain, your leverage being that you are free to leave. The exception to this is monopoly situations which is why maintaining competitive environments is so important. We still haven't quite figured out the best way to do this. Regulations, in the broad sense, can help or hurt competition.

It's a romantic idea that we can change government through democracy but these agencies are quite removed from the democratic process. We elect representatives but they can't do anything unilaterally. Their priorities will not align with each individual's priorities at any given time. Even if it does align with your specific needs they need to build some kind of consensus with other representatives about what to change. It's a slow and imperfect process.

You are talking about monopolies or quasi monopolies. Business in competitive environment are incentivized to not screw their customers. AMD vs nVidia, Walmart vs Costco, Coca-cola vs Pepsi,... Even monopolies don't like to do that as to not attract negative attention, they just fix their price high and come up with a narrative to do so.

Whenever I have an issue with a private company, it usually getd resolved a lot faster. One time I called my ISP mad that I wasn't notified of their new cheaper and better plans, and they upgraded me, paid the difference and gave me a free month. The whole ordeal from start to finish lasted 20 minutes (including wait time on the phone). And ISPs are known assholes.

The problem with governments is that they are a monopoly by default and they can't really go bankrupt (and when they do, they find a way to survive).

It's the difference between a monopoly by law rather than by economics.

If the local power utility is a private monopolist, there is still a limit to how abusive they can be before people will e.g. install solar panels, or buy a generator.

There is no limit to how abusive the local licensing bureaucracy can be because no matter what they do to you, no one can set up a competing licensing system that you can use instead. There is no equivalent to generating your own power.

And voting doesn't work when the affected people are a minority of the voters. The government could imprison everyone in the state of Nebraska and no one in Nebraska could do anything about it if the people in California don't care enough to vote in somebody else. They are in fact already incarcerating more than that many people without anybody stopping them.

It also doesn't work when the voters are misinformed. For example, the people of New York (and several other blue states) consistently pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal programs, yet their representatives continue to support high federal tax rates. Even if you support those programs, those constituents would be significantly better off if they were state rather than federal programs, and don't seem to notice this.

Of course everyone notices this. The willingness to pay taxes to benefit people beside yourself is the basic divide between left and right, so it’s not a coincidence that a more lefty state like NY elects representatives who support it.

Local taxes pay for roads and schools. Federal taxes pay for the F-35 and corn subsidies. The "people beside yourself" who "benefit" are the likes of Lockheed Martin and Monsanto.

And one of the ways we prevent monopolies, to protect the consumer, is by introducing government regulation of businesses. Look, we circled all the way back to the topic!

> You get a vote simply by existing as a citizen and can put effort into changing government.

The whole structure of the modern civil service is to be as insulated from the democratic process as possible. To make them accountable to the democratic process would mean to politicize them.

With (most) private businesses you have an alternative. They may be able to tell you to pound sand, but if you can simply go to their competitor then they probably won't.

The bureaucracy always outlives any government or political movement. Yes, there are political appointments here and there but the rank and file is permanent.

The bureaucratic wing of the new class has other special rights and privileges as well. For starters, its members are virtually unfireable. “Death—rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs—is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations,” a study by USA Today found. In 2010, the 168,000 federal workers in Washington, D.C.—who are quite well compensated—had a job security rate of 99.74 percent.

Excerpt From Suicide of the West.

You get a vote as a shareholder too.

I tend to agree that governments on the overall are held far less accountable for their actions than private companies, which will go bankrupt without patronage (without... ahem, government intervention). Government largesse extends beyond the policies of whatever administration is currently in office and therefore beyond your vote. We're talking about decades of built up cruft with no impetus for change. If you have a terrible time at the DMV, what do you do? Sell their shares? Stop shopping there? No, you just deal with it. Yes, it's one example, and I picked one that would intentionally elicit a response from almost anybody regardless of their political leanings, but that same example applies to many govt. organizations. They are inefficient and there is no correction mechanism.

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