Still the stigma remains and all public spending is filtered through a profit making entity.
The reality is that all human organizations - government, for-profit, not-for-profit - suffer from incompetence, corruption and inefficiency.
The story that the right likes to tell us is that because there is (typically) a choice of companies (and that they are subject to competition with each other), it doesn't matter (as much) if a company suffers from these things, because you can "go elsewhere".
Vertical integration in so many business sectors, along with corporate mergers and the waning of antitrust really does give lie to this, in my opinion.
For example, all US cell phone companies are shit, they all have shitty websites, shitty customer service, shitty rates, idiot salespeople ... moving from T-Mobile to Verizon because the former screwed something up solves absolutely nothing.
My observation is that size matters. Generally speaking: The larger an entity is, the more difficult it becomes to be a benefit to the public. The ability to cause harm doesn't diminish the same way (if at all).
Governments and NGOs at least have a realized duty to be a public benefit.
The same obligation is typically not recognized for corporations (eg: Shareholder good is applauded - even while it brings brings detriment to society, employees, the company).
There's also the problem of balance: several UN organizations, for example, do immense good with remarkably limited resources but occasionally they or their cousins fuck up really badly and cause severe harm. Because of the way our media (and our brains) work, we are much more aware of the fuck ups, but this is not necessarily a rational way to assess their overall efficacy.
I do think that the right has a small point in their perspective. It is almost certainly the case that being "the only game in town" does lead to a different set of incentives for public organizations. But I'm not clear that incentives are for worse behavior, at least not overall. Some parts of it are pretty complex to reason about - there's not a lot of potential within (local) government to get wildly rich, unlike in private corporations, but there's enough to keep small time grifters and scroungers happy. So it's certainly different from the private context, but better or worse is hard to say as a general rule.
They very well might. It's what follows that needs scrutiny.
Having been RW, there was some pride in adhering to a dumb fallacy: It's that if A is beneficial, then B thru Z must be beneficial. Together, A-Z become an ethics-defining principle.
But it's an unthinking, lazy assumption. Only beneficial things are beneficial. B thru Z are only what each is eventually shown to be.
The thing about groups, Zero Want To Clean Their Own House. I mean every bunch of people you can draw a line around. Every group, entity, org, corp, gov, club, lodge, council, society... Poor souls who try to fix things from the inside get quick evidence.
It may be the most universal human failing I know of. And maybe the least discussed.
Governments will happily make my life crap if I don't pay taxes. I dislike greed as much as the next person, but the monopolized incarceration powers of governments are not to be forgotten.
For some services, collective funding makes sense, like having hospitals that can stop the spread of diseases, or forcing pooling of money to locally maintain an even standard of infrastructure.
Which phone company do you positively like ? Which internet operator are you paying because you want them to thrive ? How do you feel about Qualcomm and feeding them money ?
Which private military contractors do you want your tax dollars going to?
(Comment is meant to be added on to yours, not contradict you.)
Digitech Mobile is great so far. I think that particular question is very regional. In Switzerland (and Sweden,) the competition between them works well, IMHO.
> Which internet operator are you paying because you want them to thrive ?
I don't have a choice where I live. I.e. it's as bad as a monopoly. It used to be good, but then UPC was bought by Sunrise, and they seem intent on making me leave ASAP.
> How do you feel about Qualcomm and feeding them money ?
Blissfully ignorant.
On Qualcomm, as far as I know any mobile phone sold in the west will have a networking chipset from Qualcomm or pay royalties/patents to Qualcomm for using their technology. Apple was trying to do something about it with their switch to Intel chips, but it didn't end well for them (I think they absorbed the Intel cell modem division and might be trying for a second time at some point in the future ?)
That's an interesting take. Sometimes it's roughly the same, in particular when the cable company has a def acto monopoly in the country (the smaller your country is, the worse it probably gets).
I've talked to a few people who see it as an indicator of the place's quality of life: do they have enough consumer protection to either force the monopoly to provide decent service or not have a monopoly in the first place ? how expensive is it ? (basic lifeline services at crazy price will usually go with other primary goods and services also priced crazily)
Basically, a juridiction that can't do anything about their internet won't be able to do much about a lot of other issues directly impacting their population and economy. Sometimes you just need to leave your state, sometimes your country, but either way getting away from that specific juridiction is often the better choice.
OP didn't see the difference between governments and the enterprises they provide the framework for. I explained one big difference, and why I don't think collectivizing everything is a good idea.
Were capitalism regulated, I'd agree with you - however the reality is that capitalism these days has devolved into monopoly and rent seeking:
Unhappy with your phone and especially internet provider? Good luck finding a new one, in most cases there is no competition at all or it's just as bad. Unhappy with your social network, say because there are too many Nazis and conspiracy theorists running rampant? Bad luck, no federation requirement means you'll lose all your followers and they'll lose you. Unhappy with your bank? Competition is just as fucked up. Unhappy with your railroad transport provider? Tough luck, they own the rails so you can't get another company to ship your stuff. Unhappy with your phone or PC operating system? Good luck, in the best case you just have to buy all your applications again (if they are even available at the competitor), in the worst you'll have to live with frankly sub-par open source alternatives. Your email provider banned you because you sent a photo of your naked child to the pediatrician? Even an international media outrage won't help you get your account, your digital life back.
The list goes on and on and on, and the common point is that anti-trust enforcement has gone completely down the drain.
I don't know how a government would enforce this. Nor if we want them to. Yes, you will and arguably should lose your followers if you move sites, and that's because your followers are passive browsers who don't care about you specifically. None of us are Taylor Swift who will have millions follow wherever she decides to go. That's one offset of anonymity in this case.
Also kind of funny that you mention federation as an implciit solution and then complain about email.
> Unhappy with your phone or PC operating system? Good luck, in the best case you just have to buy all your applications again (if they are even available at the competitor), in the worst you'll have to live with frankly sub-par open source alternatives.
Again, yes that makes sense. you acknoledging that they have better OS's seems to be submitting that there's value in their service. Personally, I can replicate 99% of what I use on Linux and a de-Googled AOSP, but it will vary from user to user (RIP to the artists stuck in the Adobe suite). Having a better service isn't grounds for a monopoly alone, that's just plain ol' competition.
Mandate that services over a certain user threshold expose open interfaces to which competitors can bind. That has worked reasonably well in banking and telecommunication.
> Also kind of funny that you mention federation as an implciit solution and then complain about email.
Unlike Mastodon federation or SEPA bank accounts, there is no legal requirement for the old service provider to assist in moving accounts, and I was talking about Googlemail which ties an entire person's identity across a multitude of services to one account. The person in my scenario lost everything from their mail account to the apps bought on their smartphone.
> Having a better service isn't grounds for a monopoly alone, that's just plain ol' competition.
Agreed but there have been many cases where the "better service" just bought up the competition. Adobe is the best example, and up next I'd classify Atlassian. Both of their respective stacks still show the signs of integration after decades.
But tbf, after a decade of a many public sector projects, I have first-hand seen really incompetent and wasteful actions on huge scales. Perhaps there should he a whistle blower program for reporting such things?
As others have pointed out, this is independent of whether we're talking about the government or private sector.
Regardless, when I see workers on a road crew standing around I don't think "wasted tax dollars", I think "money going back into the economy."
Of course in my view of a fair society it would be a preponderance of idle, wealthy money that is going back into the economy.
Look at the amount of money wasted on the the war on drugs.
Where do you think wealthy money is if not in the economy?
Being leveraged to extract rents, the very enemy of productivity.
How about tied up in physical assets like artwork, which they then use in a scam to lower their tax liability? That seems like one option, explored within the article under discussion.
being able to boot people is a huge difference. You could make the company millions in one month and be fired the next month by a private company, simply because it gave them an extra dollar for their quarterly earnings statement. There's an actual process for ejecting an incompetent public sector employee, to a point that it's much easier to reassign them instead. Contractors are a whole other issue as well, especially with the ways government signs contracts.
>Of course in my view of a fair society it would be a preponderance of idle, wealthy money that is going back into the economy.
that should theoretically be a function of the stock market... we all know how that ends.
Look at Japan, across the board, as just one example, now look at the US - you genuinely think there isn't substantial incompetence and corruption here?
Watch out for propaganda, it comes in many forms, from a variety of sources. One of those is your own consciousness.*
On any given night 4000 people are sleeping on San Francisco's streets and the government can't solve that with a $636 million a year budget?
The US spends more per student than any other nation and somehow we have worse educational outcomes?
So now we are left with firefighters, national parks and local parks which I guess are not good targets for power hungry and incompetent politicians.
I’m sorry, I can’t take any of this seriously. I use my neighbourhood library regularly, take my kids there, it’s a wonderful place. I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences (have you? Or did you just read online that libraries are full of homeless people?) but don’t extrapolate your experience out to a universal one.
And while they are closed to the public, the employees are still working, they are just working from home. Every week. So their plan is to have remote workers doing library work on Sunday.
But when they are open, they are very nice places.
But drive 30 minutes into the major city and it’s not a nice place. There are many homeless inside so it is messy and not a very safe place, if you don’t want someone yelling at your kid.
I think it’s appropriate to use our own experiences with libraries to form judgements.
I’m glad you (and I) have good experiences, but should we extrapolate our experiences into universal ones? What makes you think all libraries are great like yours?
I’m specifically saying we should not do that!
The OP asked for examples of competent public spending. I consider my local library to be one such example. Someone else’s library being awful doesn’t make mine an invalid example of competent spending, they’re two separate things.
What makes you think all libraries are run as well as yours? It seems the question is “does government do well, in general, at managing money?” And having an example of your local library isn’t very helpful for predicting whether government is good or bad.
I don’t think the sentiment is “every single government in existence is horrible at managing money” and more so “in general, government is inefficient at management so is not a good investment for optimal social benefit.”
I feel like I’m going crazy, I’ve said two times that I don’t think we should be talking in universalities.
Statement #1: my local library is great and is an effective use of public funds
Statement #2: my local library is awful and a waste of public money
Both of these statements can be true and neither contradicts the other. There is no need to come to some universal conclusion here.
The broader point is that you often see this approach taken when talking about public spending: one example of waste somehow invalidates the whole concept. Yet you never see someone say “invest in a private company? Did you not see what happened with Enron?!”
I also think the relevant question here is “compared to what?”. The built in assumption is that the public sector is extremely wasteful compared to private but large private companies are also extraordinarily wasteful. Think of the amount of money Meta pisses away every year on frivolous stuff that goes nowhere.
Why does it matter when roads were created? They require near constant maintenance, something public funds do. And “our roads suck” is just an absurd generalisation and is obviously not true. Of course parts of the road system suck but it’s an integral part of keeping the country running and by and large works fine.
Because we are talking about how our money will be spent now.
> And “our roads suck” is just an absurd generalisation and is obviously not true.
I disagree and I believe that "terrible roads" is public sentiment. I've never heard anyone praise our roads.
> You’re obviously coming here with a perspective and you have no actual interest in hearing counterpoints
I have a very strong opinion obviously and am open to being proven wrong but I am not going to just accept terrible arguments. The political class of this country is just completely inept. Everyone thinks in terms of "taxing the rich" as if some billionaires are going to be fund all these public mega projects. The billionaires do not have enough cash, the people that will get hammered with taxes are the middle and upper middle class.
Again: how do you think maintenance happens?
> I’ve never heard anyone praise our roads
Which is a great example of why public sentiment isn’t really worth a whole lot of anything. People love to complain. If we stopped maintaining our highways people would very quickly learn to appreciate how it used to enable full grocery store shelves, receiving packages and so on.
Absurd generalisations are absurd. If I said “I worked at Google, they waste so much money, every private corporation is a total waste of money and should be gotten rid of” would you think my perspective was a sensible, measured one?
Good point, let's get rid of all public programs except social security and road maintenance and lower everyone's taxes 20%.
I'm not actually suggesting that but it's absurd to use road maintenance as the reason why the government needs more money.
> Can you actually give examples of competent public spending?
I gave you an example of competent public spending and you’ve somehow transformed that in your head into “we should give government unfettered access to our wallets”. Absurd generalisations are absurd.
You’re very obviously not coming to this discussion in good faith. Feel free to argue against straw men in your own time but I won’t be wasting my time joining you.
> You’re very obviously not coming to this discussion in good faith
I'm not but this is the second time you've stooped to questioning my credibility (which is against the rules of hackernews). For some reason you've fixated on this one phrase of "giving actual examples" when I'm obviously pointing to a wider trend of extreme waste.
far from absurd, it's an extremely good example. The USA is filled with public infrastructure that we collectively decided to create but that we do not maintain adequately, because we choose not to spend money on it.
You say our roads suck, and to whatever extent that is true (not really interested in debating that specific point), it's because not enough is spent maintaining them.
Now of course, it's entirely possible that this situation does in fact represent the actual collective opinion of the population: yes we'll build stuff, no we will not pay (enough) to maintain it. But that has not been established.
This is not universally agreed upon. Military spending has been a deeply controversial topic along political lines given its overall amount and lack of transparency.
As far as examples of competent spending goes, there are plenty but they tend not to get as much attention as the failures do. A big example that most aren’t aware of are the government backed small business loans granted by SBA. Clean energy subsidies are another (Tesla was originally capitalized by a government clean energy grant).
You might not have known that about Tesla, but you’re more likely to have heard about Solyndra, which was funded by the same initiative and tarred in the press as an example of wasteful spending. US gov stimulates a ton of business investment behind the scenes that often goes unnoticed.
Lots of rich people exploited PPP during the pandemic, does that mean the government shouldn’t ever hand out life-saving subsidies like that?
umm... they WERE wasteful spending, in that they went bankrupt. You can drive past that building on the 880 freeway.
If you want to read about government success stories, you have to seek them out.
The theory of privatization solving problems is predicated on the assumption that competition will exist. Competition in the private sector cannot be assumed to always exist.
But separately, what does "competent" mean? Is it a measure of waste, as in we could've done what the DoD does for less? Is it a measure of useless spending, as in we shouldn't have spent money on X because X doesn't work? I don't think the (narrowing to the federal government here) the US has a monopoly on wasteful or misguided spending. I think anyone here who's worked for a company can come up with plenty of examples of incompetent spending by their employer.
I think "the US is bad at spending money so it should spend as little money as possible" argument is really weird framing, because it implies that there's some entity out there that's actually good at spending money. But if anyone can find one at a large scale, or even define what "good" means, I'm interested.
Or, I'm sympathetic to a "large entities are necessarily bad at spending" argument, but then I think we need to assail big corporations with the same zeal we assail big government.
No, this is the weird framing. As if the money has to go to some entity other than the individual that earned it. The government is taking money from individuals for their supposed benefit.
Society (that's us) want things for society and it turns out they cost money. We would love to pay for these things with razor-like efficiency but we live in an imperfect world. (The "waste" however still goes into someone's wallet and can be in turn spent at a local restaurant or on groceries.)
The only real issue I see is how we balance the tax burden in a fair and equitable way that also benefits society. (And here the increasing wealth disparity we have been seeing is almost certainly bad for societies health.)
I don't have property. The whole thing that set this entire discussion off was the parent poster that stated everyone that implied the government was wasteful was a paid shill by billionaires.
> The only real issue I see is how we balance the tax burden in a fair and equitable way that also benefits society
Yeah this post is about some billionaire dodging taxes. Billionaires are the obvious scapegoat but the fact is tax increases on billionaires are not enough to fund the multi trillion dollar ambitions of the government. The real tax base of our society is generated by the middle and upper middle class and they will be the ones that will bear the largest brunt of tax increases.
I know it sounds naive, but we are the government. Don't like what services are elected leaders are spending tax dollars on? Replace them. Bernie Sanders as you probably know requested a 10% cut in the military budget — elect more people like him if this is what you want.
> The real tax base of our society is generated by the middle and upper middle class and they will be the ones that will bear the largest brunt of tax increases.
I am much more sympathetic to people who call for, "Lower taxes for the working class!" When you include the billionaire-class as also-victims of high taxation (and they would of course disproportionately benefit from lower taxes) then it sounds to me like you're essentially carrying water for them to the detriment of society at large.
It seems when most people I hear talk about cutting government "waste" they really mean cutting out government services they disagree with — not really streamlining those services.
No, it wasn't.
It is a common refrain in parts of the Republican Party that government spending is inherently wasteful, and we should make government more like companies, or alternately "small enough to drown in a bathtub". And this is the myth that is being addressed.
It could equally well be spent by me if left in my wallet rather than taxed away and wasted.
Because you have to deal with and eventually depend upon other people's kids.
To turn your point around, can you point to any large nation with low taxes and good outcomes? Is your argument that corporate services would outperform government services? I think it's pretty clear that most of those are predatory and enshittified. Are you arguing that corporations that are in no way beholden to us voters would be more responsive to our needs than a democratic government?
Maybe my tone is coming across as too incredulous, but most libertarians I get in front of tend to shut down when I challenge their ideology, so I'm earnestly curious here.
The government is the majority.
> Time and time again people vote for services even if it means higher taxes (especially on the rich and on corporations). This is because some things don't really work if they're only funded by individuals.
Uh, I have a simpler explanation. People vote for things that are good for themselves and come up with contrived arguments for why that's moral.
> To turn your point around, can you point to any large nation with low taxes and good outcomes?
This is overly simplistic.
> Do you have good examples to the contrary, like not one-offs but large, complex societies working via voluntary contribution alone?
Have I advocated for this?
> Is your argument that corporate services would outperform government services?
I have not made that argument once. I've made the argument that government spending is wasteful. Unsurprisingly the government choosing private corporations to execute government services is also wasteful.
It seems you think I'm a libertarian because I don't like giving my money away?
> complex societies working via voluntary contribution alone?
I'm glad you think society is complex, so do I. Can you give examples of large completely centralized successful societies?
>Have I advocated for this?
So, you are advocating for the collapse of society? You don't want a society that's functional without taxes but also don't want taxes?
How much money have you ever earned all by yourself? If not for the government, me and a few buddies would come and take it.
Hell, I bet you even got all that stuff in the first place from a corporation that only exists due to governmental regulation, who has to follow a contract to pay you because if they don't, you'll sue them in government courts.
Parks and libraries are pretty well managed, too.
That question, without an agreed-upon definition of "competent," has built-in Schrödinger goalposts. Is it competent? Is it not? Is it the superposition of both?
You have to weigh that against the negative effects of profit maximisation of commercial entities for the consumer. To what extent is "Can I get away with making this product/service shittier and increase profit margins?" cause of a life getting more expensive and difficult for the average person? Take healthcare. It is getting more expensive with an aging population needing more care. But also large chunks of the healthcare supply chain become ever more commercial, with companies exploiting their cozy niche for every penny.
It’s much easier for regulators to penalise a private sector actor than a public sector actor. Anything which makes the public sector actor look bad can be perceived as an attack on the incumbent politicians, who’re usually the people who hired the regulators.
For most government agencies, it doesn't work this way. They get lots of funding, aren't able to fix the problem, and so the solution is to give them more and more funding. The result is that non or barely functional agencies are getting bigger and bigger, spawn out countless sub agencies and special task forces, and the problems they exist to solve remain. HUD funding for instance has grown multiples, inflation adjusted, since the 1980s, but no American will tell you the housing market or affordability is great right now. And HUD will get another huge increase for the next fiscal year, then again the next, ad infinitum.
This is fundamental problem. Until it's fixed, this fact, or what you term 'stigma' will continue to exist.
Typically, sizable problems that need solving do not stay fixed. Issues that have broad impact are likely either chronic or will morph into new problems.
Downsizing in the face of a chronic problem seems unwise. So does downsizing to ignore the the offshoot (or new variant) of the problem.
Good heavens no.
Turn over the bureaucracy every few years, bringing in political sycophants to replace people who actually understand the system (and, by and large, follow the law instead of kowtowing to the current demagogue-in-charge)?