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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of countries whose governments are far to the left of the Democrats who spend money much more wisely, so I don't see it as inherently tied. For example, the Scandinavian countries have much larger governments proportionally, but generally spend more wisely, and have more transparent bidding/provisioning of their state-funded services, so they get more service and less waste in return for their money.

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Thank you. Finally some common sense to counter the libertarian anti-government sentiment. Whenever they tell you that government run schools are failing, ask them why the government run schools in other countries are performing so much better. Whenever they say that government can't allocate resources efficiently, point them to the governments that have balanced their budgets. It is possible. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The solution to bad government is not to abandon it, but to work ever harder to improve it.

Getting the money / corporate influence out of government would be the place to start.

They probably do spend more wisely, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are spending on something they should be. For example in this case buying the cheaper routers would be spending more wisely, but could pretty easily be argued that this isn't something we should be spending money on. Certainly not at the federal level. Why is my tax money in Tennessee being spent on routers in WV?

There are a few components to this particular screw-up. 1 is big government spending (with little oversight) and 2 is one idiot in WV with a big budget who failed miserably at spending it.

But it could pretty easily be argued that it's something that we should be spending money on. The existence of an argument against a course of action doesn't, on its face, preclude taking that course of action. Such a line of thinking is, well, bizarre.

"1 is big government spending (with little oversight)"

The obvious problem here isn't "big government" spending. It's spending without oversight. This problem occurs all the time everywhere, in sectors both public and private. To claim that private businesses are immune to this by nature of their ability to fail and thus inherently a better mechanism than government is an absolute farce.

Take ownership of your government. To view the elimination of government as a solution to bad governance is both a lazy approach to problem solving and toxic to proper governing.

Private sector isn't immune, just not as bad.

Nobody said anything about elimination of government, just less of it.

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