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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

> but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today

On the contrary, it is a significant concern for me and I'm sure I'm not alone in my thoughts.

Fully half of the top ten richest counties in this country are suburbs of DC, a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying. I find this to be an absolute travesty that shows just how much incentive and corrupting force there is in the federal government.

Return the land to the states. Keep a small federal territorial enclave for actual federal buildings and functions. Make a lot more of these territorial enclaves all around this vast country so that power is less concentrated in one place. That's one thing the Germans got right, in their federalism.

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> a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying.

Uh, I'd expect someone posting here to know better, given that Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington and us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.

And you skipped over aerospace/defense, not to mention biotech. (Even if there is a lot of bloat in the defense sector, it's not all useless.)

> Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington

It's in Arlington because... lobbying! Bezos wanted to absorb more defense spending in AWS and chose to be physically nearby to rub shoulders and get deals.

> us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.

I doubt us-east-1 employs more than a handful of people. Datacenters are primarily hands-off. Bethesda supposedly has ~650 employees across 6 continents.

But I think you're missing the point: am I to understand that having datacenters and game developers in the area leads it to having the highest median household income in this fantastically wealthy country? Not New York with Wall Street, or Los Angeles through whose port the two largest economies in the world trade, or San Francisco with its own world-class port and all of its software industry?

Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?

You completely skipped over the defense and biotech industries, I notice. Not to mention DC being the HQ of the US military-industrial complex and the intelligence community. Like I said, there's a lot of bloat in the defense industry, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's 100% waste.

> Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?

IMO it's perfectly legitimate for organizations to advocate for their interests as long as they do not engage in bribery. They often have subject matter expertise the government does not, and more information allows for better decision-making. Would you rather the government operate in a vacuum, completely disconnected from what is going on in the rest of the country? Btw, it's not just corporations that lobby, there are plenty of NGOs doing the same thing.

If you want to blame someone for this dynamic, blame the founders of this country, who decided to create a federal district rather than put the capital in an existing city with an existing industrial base.

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