Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get this argument. Government scales with population size just fine.

Government might scale, but people's willingness to give up their own resources to help someone else does not scale indefinitely. As an extreme example, I'm much more willing to help my immediate family than my extended family and I suspect the same is true for most people. That same property extends to being more willing to pay for my local schools than for struggling schools 1300 miles away in Mississippi or being more willing to pay for support for a homeless person that I can see and interact with than to pay that same amount for one hundreds or thousands of miles away.

You could easily solve that by having social/redistributions measure on a municipality/state level... The Netherlands is also part of the EU, very little social welfare measures are effectuated through the EU, most of that happens on a state level.

If it's so easy to solve for, why hasn't it happened already?

Because the US is no longer a full democracy, and the government mainly represents corporations rather than its citizens?

The Us has never been a democracy, it has always been a (democratic)republic.

It started as a democratic republic but it isn’t currently a democratic republic.

Democracy in the US has always been flawed. The situation has been steadily improving in some areas (voting rights) with set backs in other areas (gerrymandering, legalised bribery of politicians). There's a lot that needs to be done, but the US has always pointed in the direction of democracy.

At creation US leaders were selected from a subsection of the population in all land governed by the nation. With Puerto Rico, DC, etc that’s no longer the case making the US an empire not a republic.

Controlling who has the vote has long been an issue, but denying political power to a region is a different category of thing than denying it to poor people etc.

Maybe, but then the US is a weird kind of reverse-empire, because it's exactly the capital where people don't get to vote, at least for the senate. An empire is usually where only people from the core region have any representation (if anyone does, because I don't think empires need to be democratic at all).

People in the capital do vote, just in congress rather than the general population.

Being a republic has nothing whatsoever to do with being a democracy. They are orthogonal concepts.

One of the biggest issues that prevents this is that states cannot require residency requirements (e.g. must have lived in state for 2 years) as part of the criteria for access to such social safety nets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_v._Thompson

Personally I would rather help people in a poorer area as people in my area are fine.

Anyway, money is fungible you could say you’re helping Mississippi schools just as people in Mississippi schools are helping your local schools. Or you can think of it like the electric grid where money doesn’t get sent around the country just shifted left and right regionally which smooths things out.

Where's the evidence this difference is specifically due to the population or "size" of the country rather than history, culture and any other factors? It's like you put two countries on a scatter plot and drew a line from them.

The Netherlands have been flooded multiple times over the centuries and this has contributed to the idea of helping the people in difficult situation. I don't recall exactly, but after the flood of 1825, a fond was started to collect money to help the ones who lost everything. And a large part of the population contributed money into it as everyone knew a relative or friend who lost some property, his home, or some family members. So geography and history have a part in the way the Dutch care against adversity.

Here is a list from English Wikipedia about the floods. The Dutch Wikipedia has much more info on the flood, as well as a museum in Leyden (from Rijkswaterstaat if I remember well). Not everyone can read the Dutch language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods_in_the_Nether...

It's absurd to make this argument without acknowledging the vast scope of US geography and resources compared to the Netherlands.

Richest country in the world but apparently ungovernable according to some.

The problem is that the US isn't really trying, and there's a large movement that's actively trying to make the government worse. Fix that, and I think a lot of problems will disappear.

I am not buying the assertion at face value. The bigger the government is, the harder it is to scale it. Like any bureaucracy, it quickly gains its own life, customs and belief systems. If anything, the reason small d democracy works is because the government is local, everyone is participating and invested in outcome.

The absolute worst case is you break it into independent entities the way US cities operate, larger scales can help solve problems but you don’t need to operate on them.

Exactly. Pennsylvania has 13M people. Why can’t Pennsylvania do this?

The freedom of movement between states in the US makes this a challenge. States with better social safety nets end up attracting the low-income residents from other states.

There is free movement between countries in Europe. I suppose there are generally some language barriers, but to me the situation seems fundamentally the same.

But is there freedom of access to social systems?

https://ind.nl/en/consequences-for-right-of-residence-when-a...

Nope, the countries put up significant barriers to access social safety nets (permanent residency durations, proof of working during time before that, etc).

In the US you can generally establish residency in a different state in the amount of time it takes to get a USPS change of address notice and a billing statement of some sort showing that you’re able to receive mail there.

No, there is only a limited the freedom of travel between countries in EU (not Europe), but not of movement. For many years people from the newly admitted countries in EU had no right to work in the rest of EU. Most of the diplomas are not automatically valid in other countries and in some cases, not at all - example: pilot license for light planes, I have a Romanian license and I can fly in Greece a plane registered in Romania, but not a plane registered in Greece. If I switch to a Greek license, with training and exams, I am not allowed to fly Romanian planes :(

Very different systems, very different safety nets, and non-trivial language barriers.

Yeah you can move wherever but you're not eligible for benefits, and the hiring managers want to know you speak fluent $LANGUAGE and have the right certifications from whatever credentialing system exists there.

Common currency and regulatory standards, but it's not like you're just moving from Spain to Poland, at least not without serious hurdles.

No. Leadership very much does not scale linearly. It gets more expensive the bigger you get.

Look at all the process at BigCo vs the lean startup. Government also has to deal with all those tradeoffs inherent to people managing.

This is the kind of response that makes back-end devs fume. "Why is our website going down with 100x the users we had last week? You guys must have built it incorrectly.".

Diseconomy of scale is a thing.

Does it? People complain a lot about Congress, and a lot of those problems are reasonably connected to size.

More likely, there are a benefits and costs to a large government. I doubt it's scale-free.

In fact, bureaucracy benefits from economies of scale. You can only get so small (population wise) before you can’t shrink the number of bureaucrats any further.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com