Comment by sjsdaiuasgdia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjsdaiuasgdia | Hacker News Reader

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> Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.

I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.

"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.

"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.

Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.

I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.

If value is such a nebulous term then that should make your job easier not harder because it lets you make comparisons to the "dysfunctional bigco" end of things.

The people you are arguing with think government is inefficient. They will be more than satisfied with an honest accounting that results in a conclusion that the government spends 5/10/20% more per result than private sector. Just having an actual number one can be confident in would be a huge step forward. But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.

> But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.

Setting aside whatever you mean by "you people", since we are all people, hopefully all on Team 'Make Things Better', and don't need to be divisive:

That seems to be what was requested here OF those making the claim that the accounting currently shows an unworkable level* of waste, requested BY those unconvinced of the claim.

* - Or perhaps I misread the magnitude being claimed. Could you clarify with a number, please?

> it lets you make comparisons to the "dysfunctional bigco" end of things.

I don't like to compare governments and companies, personally. They're very different kinds of structures with (hopefully) quite different goals. They probably shouldn't look much like each other.

>"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved.

No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption. I could go on.

If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way.

>There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.

Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption.

And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.

What would you say determines the market price of a kilometer of "basic road"?

What do you define the market price of someone roofing your house? Same shizz different scale.

> That's what waste and corruption does.

Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.

In the US, the goal of the healthcare system is to produce profit. So the simpler explanation is that the healthcare system consumes more money and produces less healthcare because it spends more to produce profit.

>Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.

And that's not corruption like I was saying?

Uhh... no? Not in the traditional sense of the word, no. It's how we've decided to architect our system.

"Corruption" in this context typically refers to an element of dishonesty or theft and so on.

If you mean "corrupt" in the ethical sense, then sure, kind of?

So the US taxpayers voluntarily asked their government to give them expensive and shitty health insurance instead of healthcare?

The US government doesn’t run the healthcare system, and yes voters consistently choose to keep it this way.

So ... corruption.

No.

How is "voters choose to have a system that optimizes for profit" an example of "corruption?"

Please explain your logic step by step.

Government chose the system, not the voters. And the government chose the system that benefits the private sector not the population because of corruption(call it lobbying if that makes it easier for you) from the private sector.

I've never heard Americans say "I want a system that costs me a lot, makes other people rich and give me northing in return".

Explain how that isn't corruption.

> I've never heard Americans say "I want a system that costs me a lot, makes other people rich and give me northing in return".

You're not from America, are you?

> US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy

US healthcare and childcare are private, not government. Likewise I suspect much of the education cost is private colleges/schools, not government.

You seem to be arguing that the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector.

>US healthcare [...] are private, not government.

What's Medicare and Medicaid and why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?

On a per capital basis, even if you don't include private healthcare spending, the US stil spends more per capita on healthcare than the other developed countries.

https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-government-healthcare-...

> why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?

Because these are interacting with and purchasing services from a market-driven healthcare system which is optimized for profit, not health outcomes.

Thanks for defining corruption.

Medicare and Medicaid exist because, as a society, we decided it was better to not let the old, the disabled, and the poor have zero access to health care.

Medicare and Medicaid are expensive because we incorrectly apply market economics to healthcare.

None of that requires corruption. It's a mixture of over-commitment to market-based solutions and a bare minimum of empathy enshrined into law.

You keep talking around the point and moving the goalposts. I never criticized Medicare and Medicaid. I criticized the US system which outspends all other developed nations, while obtaining poorer results. A lot more money is being spent but looking at the end results it's clearly not going to the right places. So where is the money going? That's the very definition of mismanagement and corruption.

“ the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector”

That is easily the case if you aren’t careful. Private health insurance has a big incentive to drive up cost of the medical sector so they can take a few percent as profit. Defense contractors have almost no incentive to reduce costs, quite the opposite.

I guess it depends on what you call efficiency. If you define efficiency as extracting maximum profit then modern corporations are very efficient. If you define it as providing products and services at low cost, then they are inefficient.

> Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's.

No idea if that's true. But my impression was that France's military has been rather more...active post WW2 than Germany's. So maybe it's just about practice and readiness to go to war.

The French are not just active, they have capabilities Germany straight-up lacks.

A nuclear aircraft carrier, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, solid overseas expeditionary capability (France could sustain a few thousand troops in Africa, Germany almost certainly could not match that), and a few amphibious assault ships, to name several big ones that immediately come to mind.

France developed a nuclear program immediately after WW2 in order to not depend on America for nuclear security. For obvious reasons Germany didn't do that.

Germany didn't need expeditionary capability after the war. It probably doesn't need to project force beyond its continent even today. France regularly had military entanglements in its former colonies, and probably still does. Capability is a function of necessity.

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