Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

I can not follow the linked article at all. It keeps whiplashing back and forth between "big government good" and "big government bad".

The summary, the best I can tell, is "big government bad, that's why we need to empower big government even more, so that it has the power to fix the things that big government did"?

We gave control over housing to big government, which did things the author doesn't like, so now the author wants to give them more power to fix the things they did when we gave them more power?

I have no idea what the author is trying to say. It almost gives the AI content feeling, where you read for a while and then realize you just read words that were grammatically correct but held no actual meaning.

It seems that the author is arguing for specific government policies they consider smarter than current government policies.

> It keeps whiplashing back and forth between "big government good" and "big government bad".

With respect, perhaps you are trying to fit the article into a pre-existing worldview that divides political positions into pro-big-government and anti-big-government? At least, I have heard people espouse this perspective before and it always struck me as odd -- do you think there is a correlation between the size of a government and its quality?

There exist well-run countries with higher levels of government spending (e.g. Scandinavian countries) and lower levels of government spending (e.g. Switzerland, Singapore).

And there exist poorly-run countries with higher government spending (Greece, Brazil) and lower government spending (Hati, Somalia).

Similarly, some large companies are run well and others poorly, and some small companies are run well and others poorly. Scale confers advantages and disadvantages but doesn't seem inherently bad.

The basic thesis is that big government is bad when the gears are gummed by excessive participation/procedure, but good when it provides fast grants to pressing issues.

wouldnt the fastest possible grant be no requirement for grant at all?

generally you use grants when there isn't money

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