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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

> very little trust in many public institutions.

As opposed to...... the private institutions that created most of those problems?

This is a strawman. The OP didn't mention trusting private institutions over public institutions, just that you can't ever trust American public institutions to do the right thing for you before being dragged kicking and screaming. What the poster says is true. Living in the US is coming to terms with "every person for themselves" is reality, and that it "does not square with the material wealth of the US". You can trust public institutions to some extent more than private, but interacting with them is still all about fending for yourself. Being familiar with the American government and living in another country that treats its citizens much better (at least for daily operations and processes) opens your eyes to how bad it is. It's a horror how much money the US has while failing to invest the majority of profits back into raising standards for everyone. Dozens of countries do better with much less.

Well who else is there to solve the problem?

> It's a horror how much money the US has while failing to invest the majority of profits back into raising standards for everyone.

That's because of private institutions too. Regulatory capture is the reason we can't govern worth a shit in the US. The only remotely feasible way to solve environmental tragedy of the commons issues is through regulation.

To get there you have to be using a definition of "private institutions" which is coterminous with all of humanity. Regulatory capture regularly happens by government employees (i.e. public sector unions who want makework jobs), ordinary homeowners who want high housing costs at the expense of new buyers because they've already bought in, the AARP lobbying for massively expensive medicare expansions and other healthcare rules that disproportionately benefit affluent retirees etc.

The incentive of those groups to lobby for their own personal gain is inherent in their existence. If government employees or private homeowners or retirees exist then they'll want what benefits them over what benefits the general public. So the problem of regulatory capture is a problem of how to constrain the government from making rules at the behest of special interest groups.

I'm talking about business and industry. Neither government employees, their unions, nor the AARP are the forces lobbying to allow pollution of public resources -- the ones who are doing so are the polluters who directly benefit from it.

Governments are some of the largest polluters in the world. Any given special interest is lobbying for the thing they want at the expense of the general public.

Is there something that makes pollution different than e.g. professional licensing capture that increases the cost of trade services and therefore causes people to be priced out of making safety-related repairs? Or to put it the other way, any reason the likes of public transit systems should be able to operate whatsoever when they produce non-zero amounts of brake dust and CO2 instead of making everybody walk everywhere?

> That's because of private institutions too. Regulatory capture is the reason we can't govern worth a shit in the US

I think the ingrained "every person for themselves" attitude is more fundamentally a problem. Fix one expression of it and 10 more will turn up.

That's the long term result of constant propaganda by the same folks who are also working towards regulatory capture. The same groups who put up billboards and political ads begging the American people to bend over backwards for big business, because clearly any accountability is a restriction on freedom™. Somehow they've managed to literally convince people that, if you can't dump the acid mine drainage and waste frack water in a local river, everyone is going to lose their job and the power grid will go dark. If you convince enough people to believe this shit, you win regulatory capture.

publicly traded institutions, maybe?

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