Maybe consensus shifts (or goes away) about which problems are the domain of government, buy ultimately it's about efficacy against those. The rest is a distraction.
For example, people "need" access to healthcare, but there's essentially an unlimited amount of money you could spend to keep improving healthcare (e.g. opting for increasingly expensive treatments with diminishing returns on health outcomes). The more money you allocate to healthcare, the less you have available to spend on other things that people "need". Sure, you can tax more up to a point, but eventually that tap runs dry and you're forced to reallocate existing resources.
As another example, people "need" criminals to be punished in order to be able to live in a safe a crime-free society. People also "need" to not be put in prison when they are innocent. But you can never be 100% sure that a convicted criminal actually committed the crime. Locking up criminals implies by necessity that you will also lock up some innocent people. No government can solve both of these problems simultaneously which means they are all "bad".
Even the most competent "good" government ultimately has to select among which "bad" things it is going to allow to continue and which it will solve.
Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few.
A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.
Who is "we"? We're talking about governments in general ("good" vs "bad" ones), and I have no idea what jurisdiction you are referring to.
In any case, I didn't say the tap is dry. I said if you keep raising taxes it will eventually run dry. Or to put it another way, taxes are not an unlimited resource that you can keep increasing as much as you'd like. At some point you'll hit a ceiling where raising taxes any further doesn't produce additional tax revenue.
For example, as you raise income tax rates, people have less incentive to advance their careers (e.g. by chasing promotions or improving their skills), and people have more incentive to leave the jurisdiction and go somewhere with lower taxes. Up to a point, the increase in tax rates produces a net extra revenue for the government. Above a certain point, the number of people who stop paying taxes (e.g. by leaving or by working less) outweighs the gains from those who continue to pay. This is why you'll rarely see any government with excessively high top-bracket tax rates (e.g. 60 - 100%), because it results in tax losses.
> For tax years 1944 through 1951, the highest marginal tax rate for individuals was 91%, increasing to 92% for 1952 and 1953, and reverting to 91% 1954 through 1963.
Since that time, the income tax rate has declined, especially for the higher brackets. From my perspective, it kinda just sounds like wealthy people got greedy and they were able to advocate for income tax changes. Back then, they couldn't pull as much funny business as they do today with high compensation modalities ($1 trillion for Musk?) so they opted for marginal tax rate reduction. But there's no evidence from what I can see that the the money was about to "run dry." Quite the opposite it seems. Even in nordic countries, the money is not "running dry". They have great support systems in large part because of the high marginal tax rates.
Surely we can agree that there is a threshold, even if we don't agree where that threshold is. That's all there is to the point I'm trying to make: tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like.
That's a strawman. There are no proposals for a 100% tax across tax types. There is an argument for reversing the direction of the last several decades in which taxes on the wealthiest have been dramatically cut.
Assuming "we" means the United States, this isn't really true. Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably stable, not just since the 1980s, but since the end of World War II [1].
The long-term average since 1945 is 16.85%, the average in the 1970s (i.e. the decade before the 80s) was 16.76%, and the average in the 2020s is 16.96%.
In the US at least, that’s the perception because the tax cuts get a lot more publicity than the increases; everyone know that Reagan passed what was, to that time, the biggest (at least in aggregate nominal terms) tax cut in US history, fewer know that he followed it with the biggest increase.
But what has actually happened is a series of tax burden shifts (often, downward from the wealthiest, though some have been the other way or largely orthogonal to wealth.)
A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.
Others have attempted to refute your above statement, but it's not really relevant. Your response does not really align with the parent post, because at no point did the post you replied to say "We need to tax less all the time!" or even "we need to tax less!" or "we cannot have better health care".
None of these things were said, advocated for, or espoused as a position.
Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what".
This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?
> This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?
Sure. That's like saying fire is hot and water is wet. The fact that tradeoffs obviously exist doesn't mean we can make meaningful changes to improve things.
But that statement was summarizing a portion of the original author's post. If placed back in the context it came from, you can see the original author was not saying we cannot make meaningful changes. At all.
Instead, the author was said:
Aside from the fact that there's a subjective definition problem here (how do we decide what people "need"?), I think this an unrealistic view. By this definition, every government that has ever existed or ever will exist is a "bad" government because no government can ever tackle every single problem 100% of the time. Many problems are extremely difficult to solve (e.g. global warming), and others simply cannot be solved without creating other problems.
Thus, they are not defining this as a "we cannot improve things", but instead "if we improve things, some will see that as bad" conjoined with "in other cases, we improve things, but not as fast/completely as desired".
As far as I can see, there is not a single point that the original author said we cannot improve things. They don't even hint at that.
(research hint: inflation, and that millennia old quote/insight: the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government...)
Neither. Government is just the system through which policy that either greatness or lessens inequality is implemented. For example, government can decrease an inheritance tax, therefore increasing inequality, or they can do the opposite to reverse it.
The reality however is that all governments are a mixture of good and bad, and different people will see that mixture in different proportions. One person might overlook the fact that their government funds the Israeli military because their government does plenty of other "good" things to make up for it. Another person might find that to be a completely unacceptable compromise.
Thoroughly explained here: https://youtu.be/KDwCUAueLUU
What the "man-made global warming crisis" is, is an example of how a corrupt/captured state will overreach and control the people for its own gain through manipulation. Many governments are captured by the now global financial system that has almost unlimited power due to its money printers. It charges interest on money that it prints out of thin air. By leveraging its existing power to steer the governments to spend money it is able to effectively spend printed money (governemnt loans) on itself and then receive interest on that money as a bonus. A positive feedback loop that ends in global domination by the unelected financial system with the national and international central banks at its heart. Even worse is that it's power obtained essentially through fraud - it's all based on lending out something for interest that isn't theirs. It started with them lending out gold that people had given them to safely look after in their vaults.
If you're interested in finding the truth, then you'll at least begin watching it to see if it offers any promise.
The reality is that global warming is definitely happening, and also the Earth is definitely not flat. But it's pretty easy to make a super convincing argument that the Earth is flat - you just don't mention any of the math behind why the Earth is round and then you can have a 5 hour long video filled to the brim with evidence the Earth is flat.
And it's not even lying. We're not saying anything that's not true. We're just choosing to omit data and evidence that proves us wrong. We can even include fake data and evidence, if we want, and refute that - ie build a strawman.
Appeal to authority is a dubious fallacy to invoke in the first place. If I need to assume something about (let's say) geology - which I know little about and haven't the time to research myself - I'm going to trust the general consensus of professional geologists. I'm not going to waste my time listening to a marine biologist who sounds like a crank and claims they've discovered that the whole field is bogus.
"If you're interested in finding the truth, you'll at least" check out this (surprise surprise, textual) take-down of the movie, with a comprehensive set of links debunking (in, surprise surprise, text form) the hackneyed climate myths that it brings up: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-the-movie-a-hot-mess-of...
Fair point. Although two wrongs don't make a right.
> If I need to assume something about (let's say) geology - which I know little about and haven't the time to research myself - I'm going to trust the general consensus of professional geologists.
This is the intelligent, inituitive approach - I agree. However one of the main points that the documentary makes is that there's a hidden corruption involved which means that in the case of climate this is actually the wrong approach to take. The combined state and money printer-backed financial system has an enormous incentive to encourage scientists to find a global climate crisis, and because most scientists rely on government funding, they in turn have enormous incentives to produce statistics that align with this, or else lose their funding. The so-called climate experts that are presented to you are in fact selected by this system because they produce work that aligns with the system's incentive to make people believe there is a climate crisis.
This corruption all stems from the fact that we gave a few questionable people a money printer, and decades later they're getting closer and closer in their ultimate goal of enslaving the world.
https://x.com/OppCostApp/status/1952831340597948565 (only a two minute video this time)
Read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" or "Broken Money" by Alden for the full story.
Ultimately either the evidence is correct or it's not, no matter how it's funded. This documentary demonstrates how much of the current mainstream evidence is in fact incorrect, explains why it's incorrect (both the errors and the incentives involved) and then provides evidence for why the small degree of measured warming over the last decades is both happening perfectly naturally and is not very significant compared to periods in the history of mankind.
You must at least admit that much of the evidence backing the climate "crisis" we have been fed over the last decades was actually just projections from models. Models that have generally been proven to be completely wrong. If you take a look for real evidence of detrimental effects from any change in the climate, it's simply not there.
[0] https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/fake-graphs-and...
If you want to do that, far better to embed animations in a mostly-textual doc.
> Life itself is presented to our brains in a dynamic audio-visual format ... does that encourage the suspension of critical thinking?
Yes, to an extent. Or at least text allows critical thinking more easily than the average conversation does. Text makes it really easy to pause and think for a moment before reading on. Or to check back on something you vaguely remember reading beforehand. It's a more active form of ingest than watching a video. Video-makers have many more techniques at their disposal to slip their narrative past critical filters, such as varying the speed of delivery, or using music to invoke emotional reactions.
In my view, a government that does nothing to tackle global warming is "bad". In your view, a government that spends resources on something you think is a fraud, is also "bad". We can't both be right.
I agree that
> a government that does nothing to tackle global warming is "bad"
and I think you would likely also agree that
> a government that spends resources on something you think is a fraud, is also "bad"
The only difference is that it has managed to convince you that man-made global warming is real, just like it did me for a long time.
Global warming is indeed real. Effective change doesn't have to cost a dime. An example is forcing people to buy electric cars at some point. The government spends nothing, people just buy new cars when their old cars expire, now people are driving new cars. Solved.
(you may notice that incentives are gone in most countries now)
And if the weirdos would stop trying to crush every tiny part of carbon emissions, dams provide an immense amount of cheap, clean power once built. We can even make concrete using low-emission methods. Regardless, dams are far better than coal or gas (yes they are random anti-concrete weirdos), so moving on a path to 'better' is laudable and helpful.
(Yes, anti-concrete weirdos are either useful idiots or secret lobbyists. Why? Well, my city puts more concrete into new basements in a single year, than go into a dam that lasts 50 years. Yet I only hear people blather on about dams, which would save immense pollution from coal, the worst polluter it would replace. Also, I've now out-conspiracied the conspiracy guy I'm replying to.)
Power plants expire, whether gas, coal, etc, and instead of revamp you slowly build new, and expire the old.
None of this has to cost. There is no cabal to enact global warming related change.
There has been no man-made climate change during the period of "modern humans" either.
It's not a conspiracy as such - it helps to think of government and corporations as an AI. A hive intelligence with constraints and goals. The constraint is to operate within legislation and keep the people on board, the reward/goal is to acquire money/power.
At this stage the financial system (which we gave a money printer!) has obtained enough power to steer legislation in its favour and keep the people on board though manipulation of the mainstream media and education.
Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.
I completely agree that there's no reason why we can't replace power plants with more environmentally friendly ones as they are retired, but ask yourself why Germany then has shut down it's fully operational nuclear power plants. Even with energy shortage and the many of the plants ready to be turned back on tomorrow, the state refuses to.
That film is full of misleading nonsense. Like, charts that have been altered to apparently suit a narrative.
Can we just use this as our point of agreement?
Extending this reasoning, we should not blissfully put our data into anyone's hands.
Government mission at least have a veneer of public servants, as opposed to private hands whose only real motivation is fiduciary obligations towards the shareholders.
The interest of a government is to control its citizen, either now or at some point in the future.
The interest of a private company is to make more money.
Between the two, I certainly prefer a private company attempting to monetize my data rather than a government trying to control me either now or in the future. And let's stop the bs about "public servants", even in the EU which is maybe the most democratic bloc in the world, governments are trying to impose a chat control (among other laws restricting freedom). It's just in the nature of governments to control its population
In most situations, private companies will share any data they have about you with the government anyway. And can be compelled by law to do it.
So going private is net loss.
The latest example: https://en.zona.media/article/2025/08/27/irin
That said, no matter how secure GrapheneOS may be, for this particular threat a permanently clean phone is a necessity.
But countries that have fallen that far off the path are not worth saving anyway.
Governments that public force to kidnap, torture, murder, "disappear" their own citizens, are bad. Plenty of examples to go around, both historically and currently: China, Russia, México, North Korea, Belarus, the balcans, plenty of African governments, etc.
It shouldn't matter that "34% of my neighbors" want me sent to a concentration camp, personally I wouldn't want to end up there.
The example you're giving, the whole "it really depends on people's views, ..." is a bad government.
And the truth is that it's easy to be a good government: don't be bad.
Edit: fixed a word.
>In 2015, the Guardian revealed Chicago Police had allegedly employed torture and days-long unlawful detention at the secretive “black site”-like Homan Square facility
And the federal government knew and participated.
>“When we’re doing joint operations with the federal government, it’s generally — it’s under the supervision of an Assistant U.S. Attorney and they’re merely using our facility because it’s more convenient."
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/03/15/feds-used-chicago-black-s...
At what point does the "good" cross over into the "bad"? Is it ok that having a highly regarded government comes at the price of dead children? How about the sizeable group of people (e.g. in the US and Israel) who don't believe there is any genocide at all? Doesn't that make the whole thing subjective?
There are obviously a lot of dimensions and clusters within those dimensions and we can't always say exactly which nationalist fascists to beat to death with hammers for the global good, but we can say Norway is a bit removed from them.
Of course there is, compare the government of Finland to that of North Korea. Just because there are shades of grey and human institutions are generally susceptible to corruption greed an power politics doesn't mean there aren't governments that are different not only in degree but in kind.
To some degree it feels like bits and pieces of anti-intellectualism getting into folks brains: rejecting the idea that folks can think about things at all.
Whataboutism is bullshit. Power corrupts. It doesn't matter if you idealize a government, it's still composed of people who get compromised by money, power and general corruption.
But as time goes by and I travel the world, I find it's hard to deny that there are and always were distinct classes within human civilization, though the lines may be blurred here and there, and almost everything within every human society serves to preserve those classes, whether as the direct intentional goal or as a convenient side effect.
"Govern" is to "rule"
Other commenters mention the lack of government, and pockets of chaos where gangs/bandits/warlords/disasters run rampant, but those too are different classes versus each other, or vacuums where classes have yet to [re]form.
Only someone who never has seen war would think they need no defense
No it does not. It depends on peoples morals.
> No it does not. It depends on peoples morals.
Morals are a kind of views.
Who said “just”? I'm arguing against minimizing conflicts of views as inherently insignificant, low consequence things.