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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

"Solutions brought to you by the government" tend to do the opposite of what they intended. I shall remain skeptical.

Well, I wouldn't say they do the opposite of what's intended, they just do the opposite of whatever lie they told you to get you to accept it.

In this instance, the proposal is to dramatically increase the price of housing by giving away free money to people that they can only use if they buy housing

> Well, I wouldn't say they do the opposite of what's intended, they just do the opposite of whatever lie they told you to get you to accept it.

They also have the nasty side effect of doing far more than anyone intended.

Like that time they gave away subsidized loans for college and then acted surprised when the price of college increased.

Ya, then they promised to forgive all of the loans so that people would be willing to take out even bigger ones to drive prices up even higher.

The purpose, of course, was a massive transfer of wealth to the colleges and universities which were an important political ally and perpetual source of newly-indoctrinated voters. But people wouldn't have supported "giving a trillion dollars to the elite colleges that support the party"

The only promise the government made to forgive loans is the public service loan forgiveness program, which was designed to encourage people to work in underserved areas without offering a large enough salary to attract talent on the normal market. Essentially it is a weird subsidy for undesired jobs.

Some politicians promised a more generic student loan forgiveness, but politicians promise a bunch of things.

I think you have causation backwards. The price of college kept going up, so the government started offering loans.

That wasn’t the goal?

They gave out subsidized loans so more people could go to college… and guess what, more people went to college.

How about "Solutions brought to you by giant corporations"? At least you can vote politicians out of office.

You can vote corporations out of business. You just vote with your wallet. Very effective.

Yeh remember when Comcast was rated the worst company in America year over year? Wonder what ever happened to them?

They were given monopoly rights to broadband provisioning by governments.

So were others but they weren't rated worst company in America for many years in a row.

When giant corporations own or buy 90% of everything then voting with your wallet is not effective at all.

Plus if they're large enough the government will bail them out when they fail assuring there's less room for a better replacement to sprout up.

Clearly works well. See Nestle.

Statistically, nobody stopped buying Nestlé, this seems like a dead example.

No. That is the reason it's a great example. Nestle perpetuates horrors around the world and barely enough people know or care enough to even stop purchasing their products. "Voting with your wallet" is apparently not a very effective deterrent because it doesn't stop anything. Even a company who does as much damage to the world as Nestle.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/nestle-company-pollution-...

If Google or Comcast puts me on their shit list it's just a big inconvenience.

If government puts me on their shit list I wind up in a cage.

If your local power company thinks still you owe them $50 after you move out of a rental you might get harassed by collectors and have your credit dinged. If your local government thinks you owe them $50 there's a good chance eventually wind up with a warrant out for your arrest. It gets even worse when you consider how often these kinds of entities make paper pushing errors.

The entity we entrust with the power to use violence shouldn't be sticking its fingers in anything where we aren't willing to accept more violence.

Except the dust bowl, or polio, or gps, or the bill of rights, or...

You know, the people who say this and the people who want to defund the police ought to get together sometime; you'd think they'd be natural allies, but no.

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