I’ve Joined the White House’s U.S. Digital Service
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There are plenty of smart companies in America that can fix America's IT problems if they are paid to do so. There is no political will to do so. That is why companies you never heard of come up again and again as subcontractors for things like Healthcare.gov
Believe it or not, there are some very smart people working in government. They actually don't need us in Silicon Valley to tell them how to do stuff. They know what they could do with the latest technology. They are not allowed to do so because of bureaucracy.
That was true a couple of years ago, but healthcare.gov was a wakeup call, and everybody from the president on down takes reforming government IT seriously.
I was part of the healthcare.gov "tech surge" and I can tell you firsthand that the government is willing to change. In the last year, the healthcare.gov UI was streamlined from 76 to 16 screens for the average user. Large parts of the site now run on AWS and more is moving. The most problematic individual component, the login system, was rewritten from scratch with an API-compatible, drop-in replacement which now serves 100% of traffic. And this has been done within the same agency responsible for the original site. It is not a story of "smart hackers" parachuting in and wresting control away from government bureaucrats, but rather partnering with the agencies and creating reform from within.
USDS itself, although started by the White House, now has bipartisan support and a real budget to grow. Although you are right that there are powerful entrenched interests in the beltway, the political will to change is there, and now the challenge is to recruit people like Andrew to seize the opportunity.
So, you worked for a short while on an extremely high-profile project with the personal daily attention of the president. Yes, that does tend to smooth things over - but don't mistake that for a fundamental change in government priorities. There are 2.6 million federal employees, you don't re-jig politics and incentive structures that has been entrenched over decades overnight with a single successful project.
Sure, showing that it can be done is always a good first step, and I'm not saying that anyone actively wants to fail - but only just barely. More often than not it feels that a failure you can blame on someone else is better than a mediocre success (good luck running an election campaign on having reduced the number of screens in a system or migrating it to AWS).
Why don't you ask the people who work at USDS if they're having trouble getting interest from the agencies? That would be a way to test your hypothesis.
But my question would be this: Are your political sponsors (a number of rungs up) invested in your work? Are they willing to take flak for your team (ie. take personal career risk) when (yes, when) things go wrong and provide the cover to help you turn things around, or are they more likely to throw the cocky Google-kids under the bus and declare "experiment failed" the second things turn a bit sour, and return to business as usual?
Now, answer the same question again, but 18 months from now, on the hypothetical that the next president isn't going to have this much on the agenda. What happens when heading the USDS doesn't mean briefing the president in the oval, but rather briefing a junior staffer to an undersecretary of the treasury?
Getting positive answers to all those is what real change looks like.
Maybe if the President has his personal eye on a project something could get done. But the President isn't going to put his personal eye on the USPTO back-end for example. Or the FAA exemptions submission page. Or any of a thousand other points of contact between the public and government.
I'm curious what, if any, security obstacles you faced with this, especially considering HIPAA and all that.
That environment has its own security accreditation
Our security audit was apparently the first one in years to pass with no "high findings" (high-priority security issues that must be fixed before the system is approved to go live).
The main barrier we ran into was that although AWS was already FedRAMP-certified, it had not gone through CMS's own internal security review process, which requires hundreds of pages of additional documentation and an audit of the code, team, and penetration testing of the live system. At the end of that process, you get an Authority to Operate, or ATO, and that's what every site in the government legally must have in order to launch.
You can get a sense of how much paperwork is involved here: http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/CMS-...
Navigating this ATO process was the single largest roadblock in developing the various parts of healthcare.gov 2.0. It meant that what we expected to take two months ended up taking more like eight.
The good news is that once we had gotten an ATO for AWS [1], any project within CMS--not just healthcare.gov--could start using AWS. [2] And within weeks of the ATO, we started hearing about other groups building their new projects on AWS, including Accenture, who's now the primary healthcare.gov contractor.
And that also means that if a startup wants to work with CMS, rather than the typical set of DC contractors, now they can use AWS too and have one fewer barrier keeping them out of the system.
[1] as a small technical point, we split the ATO into "infrastructure" and "application" portions so that the infrastructure (AWS) portion could be reused.
[2] If you're wondering why it matters that the government can use AWS, it's because most data centers that cater to the government are really terrible. In the initial data center used for healthcare.gov, the way you provisioned a new server was to send a word document to a sales representative, listing the unix packages you want installed, and then a few weeks later they would give you a virtual machine which may or may not have what you asked for. You can't be agile at all in that type of environment, and you certainly can't do DevOps well because you can't script anything.
I recently finished a project whereby it took over a year, from kickoff to handoff to deploy two blade servers.
Government IT is often extraordinarily hamstrung in the types of solutions it can deploy due to mandatory requirements to use certain security software, or employ specific policies. [1] While those policies come with a framework for adapting them to the needs of an environment, most don't understand them, and so you're often stuck with a computing environment that any DevOps engineer would find to be practically broken. There's an enormous amount of manual steps and needless shuffling between systems to accomplish the most rudimentary of tasks.
This enormous inefficiency is accepted as being inevitable. Because simple tasks take so long, and making them more efficient would require enormous effort (such getting exceptions to policies approved), the issue is often solved by adding more people. Contractors make their money through staffing, so if you can show that you can get more done with more people, then it can be a good sell. Costs, however, go up. This is where your overruns come from.
(Regarding ATOs, that sounds like the "Type" vs. "Site" accreditations I'm familiar with.)
The reason you have the same companies has very little to do with "insider" status and much more to do with the fact that these companies have made it their business to be able to operate in the federal environment.
Bureaucracy, far from being a conscious, malevolent tool, is simply the accumulated barriers and obstacles erected over time for every instance there was an anomaly or problem. Accountability was demanded, and new guidelines put in place. These stack up over time, long after the original incidence has ceased to be a major issue. Unlike the private sector where companies and organizations can simply be wiped out and start with a clean slate, government doesn't (and for various reasons, can't) do that.
There's still money to be made however, for those who are familar with the process. Simply being eligable to bid for government work means getting approved on a contract vehicle, complying with various laws on accountability and record keeping, and ticking off various checkboxes for equal representation of genders and minority groups. These regulations are removed and unfeeling of special circumstances or facts on the ground; they are the accumulated "good intentions" of laws passed that now stack up like strata.
People who know this system well are intimidated by all of this, which is why you see many government and defense retirees move on to the private sector to steer these small companies into this kind of work. They know how it works, and just knowing that is a skillset in and of itself.
It's not evil. And there's far less cronyism than one might suspect. (I'm not claiming for a moment that it doesn't happen, but somewhat surprisingly, it's minimal.) Improvements are not consciously forbidden, and making things better is not discouraged. But like an enormous traffic jam, no single person has room to do much of anything. Coordinating a number of people to try and move in a better direction can improve things a little, until they are stopped by another group who has no room to move.
It's a mistake to think of government IT as insidious. It's a problem we have built over time that we have created ourselves. To fix it will require enormous bravery to do away with volumes of regulations that, by themselves, probably did some good. And it will require tolerance of practices done in private that would never have seen the light of day, but in government, has the spotlight of oversight shining on. It will be a challenge to solve.
Yes, of course the companies that get government contracts need to be experts at getting government contracts -- the problem is that they do not need to be experts at what they actually _do_, what they're getting paid for. There's in fact very little room left to be experts at what they do, after all the expertise they need to develop (and resources spent on same) in getting and keeping contracts.
If you're a company and your motive is making a profit, then of course there's plenty of money to be made, exactly.
The system you describe sounds pretty insidious to me. "Insidious. adj. proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects."
The harmful effects are exactly the privileging of expertise at government contracting over expertise at doing a good job. That's harmful only if you prioritize doing a good job, if you prioritize making a profit I suppose it's just fine.
> But like an enormous traffic jam, no single person has room to do much of anything. Coordinating a number of people to try and move in a better direction can improve things a little, until they are stopped by another group who has no room to move.
Yes, quite, that's quite insidious, exactly. It has some unique features to government, but also some commonalities with any large bureaucracy.
You're right in that expertise in getting contracts often has a tendency to displace expertise in IT. This has been a persistent problem in hiring. Contractors need to fill billets that come with mandatory requirements dictated by the government. Skilled individuals are often bypassed because they lack a certain certification (often unrelated to their work) or a certain parameter. In defense, security clearances can be an enormous barrier by limiting only those who possess a clearance as eligible. (There's an "insidious" effect whereby you must be on or joining a project that requires a clearance to get a clearance, and you cannot join a cleared project without a clearance.) Pay is often much lower than compared to the private sector when compared to the industry as a whole, but since the layout of the federal government is separate than what drives the private IT industry, it creates opportunities for many where a grassroots IT industry wouldn't otherwise exist.
There are good people who enter the environment and make positive change, but they are few. There are many more who work at a perfectly capable level and do the best they can, but would be considered underqualified for their role. This is an area where the Digital Service seems to me trying to make a difference, as government IT rarely attracts the IT elite.
That is a great metaphor. Anybody who's considering joining USDS, I think ckozlowski's comment gets the situation exactly right. You are unblocking a traffic jam.
I know -- very condescending, isn't it? Gee, it's a good thing these really smart folks are showing up. What would we have done without them? A broken system must obviously be full of incompetent people.
I wish these guys the best, but this is 90% bullshit and 10% reality.
Just to cite one, small (?) problem: in commercial IT, if you don't like the work somebody is producing? You fire them. In government IT, no such thing exists. Managers spend years shuffling around poor-performing employees in a desperate attempt just to keep the lights on.
I could go on, but it would all just wash over folks. This is a movement, dammit! We all feel so very excited! This time is different!
So I will help do whatever I can -- blog, comment, debug, whatever. But I will not become suddenly blind to the realities of the system that we are attempting to change. That doesn't do anybody any good. That ain't cynicism, that's reality. Hope is not a strategy, and you can't fix a system you can't honestly describe. (or understand how it got that way)
My own perspective: There are amazingly smart people working in government, and even working for many of the contractors commonly cited as examples of The Problem. Many of these individuals are not effective not because they're incompetent (and therefore need to be told what to do), but because they are not empowered, or they lack confidence or a team of people they can use to propel good solutions forward. Bureaucracy and internal politics are rampant. One way to look at what we're trying to do here is to act as a nucleus of tech expertise inside these agencies, to attract and empower those individuals to do the right thing while providing air cover from the White House when they're prevented from doing so.
That being said, there is a vanishingly small number of actual engineers working for the government. Normally this role belongs to the contracting companies. The incentives here frequently encourage overly large, excessively complex designs, and implementations that maximize the number of humans rather than good engineering practices. By improving technical literacy within government we improve the government's ability to identify bad contracts and methods to prevent these situations from happening in the future.
We are not blind to the fact that there have been other attempts before us. The key differences I see are (a) support from the top and (b) funding.
Best of luck!
If a lot of these things were done in-house in the government itself, things would be a lot more efficient.
The phrase "US Digital Service" makes it sound like a "reified" civil service organization in its own right. There is a USDS Headquarters, which seems to support this notion.
In the copy[1], however, it says that the bulk of the work is done by "agency teams" which, if I'm understanding right, kind of "embed" with their assigned gov't agency. The copy also says they're recruiting founding members for new agency teams. The phrase "founding members" makes it sound, almost, like the teams are independent operations but knowing the federal gov't as I do, that can't possibly be right.
Does anyone here have any light they can cast on whether the USDS is an agency unto itself? If not, what cabinet secretary does it fall under? I have a ton of questions about how this works.
edit: My biggest fear with the USDS is that it can be smothered in the cradle by the next administration. There simply doesn't seem to be enough employees to make dissolving it -- or, maybe more likely, starving it to death budget-wise -- a big deal.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser...
This is correct. The HQ team is a part of OMB, the White House's Office of Management and Budgest.
The agency teams can be thought of as a franchise model, we work closely with the HQ team and the other agency teams, but we're also a for real part of the agency we work at.
(Just realized who I was replying to, welp!)
The broad notion is that private-sector IT culture has undergone major change in the last couple of decades. The failure of HealthCare.gov under the old model and its subsequent turnaround using the sort of modern methods common in Silicon Valley woke people up to the possibility of doing something new.
The question, then, is how to get government working like we do. (At least where it's beneficial; we solve a lot of our mistakes by shutting down companies, but government departments can't work like that.)
A number of things have been tried, starting with the Presidential Innovation Fellows. [1] The US Digital Service is the latest pass. The USDS HQ is under the US CTO, which I believe makes it part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy [2], which is part of the Executive Office of the President [3]. The agency teams are embedded in the agencies themselves, and so I'd assume those are legally under the appropriate cabinet secretaries. I get all this mainly from the USDS pages. [4]
Personally, I suspect that this is not a lot of money. It's mainly people, and they made clear that they will be paying industry salaries, not government salaries. And given that it is getting government to reduce waste and learn from the private sector, I expect it has bipartisan appeal.
Even if the next administration dissolves it all, though, I expect it will still have a fair bit of effect. As anybody in the industry knows, the switch from 18- to 36-month cycles to 1-4 week cycles is pretty much permanent because the culture has shifted. People just expect stuff sooner now.
But I hope the next administration continues the effort. At the meeting it was clear there were a lot of people in tech who really want to go serve their country by taking a couple years to make the government run better. It'd be foolish not to take advantage of that yearning for public service.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Science_and_Technolog...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Office_of_the_Preside...
[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser...
Regarding pay, I dunno. Based on quotes from this[1] article, the pay scale seems to cap out at GS15 Step 10 which is ~132k. Now obviously this is still a lot of money but if I'm reading between the lines of his quotes right, this is the most an engineer can make w/ USDS without bumping up to SES (Senior Executive Service) levels. Not to say that's substantively less than industry salaries, but they definitely are paying government salaries (by definition).
As far as dissolution, I'm talking more from the perspective of attracting & retaining top talent. With a private sector startup, you trade job security for potentially out-sized payoff. But here... Anyway, point being I think the risks should be articulated well.
[1] http://fcw.com/articles/2014/10/27/red-tape-holding-back-hir...
(source: I almost took an offer at the VA-embedded Digital Service. Still wishing I could have made it work)
And frankly, $132k in the DC area is about as pitiful in the Bay Area if you ask me. Defense contractors alone command $140k salaries for senior developers frequently (the contractors that still do have contracts that is). If you're in "cybersecurity" (whatever BS that actually means is beyond me when it comes to the technical definitions) you can get that with some pretty solid experience beforehand and reach into $200k as an engineer (not being management, which is usually where the caps on compensation tend to lift - see the ES pay scale compared to the GS).
Also, one of the big points about USDS is they are paying at or above market rate for developers which is something they have not done in the past. I think all the speculation in your comment is off the mark.
Regardless, I greatly welcome change to the federal service system in any way to promote better retention and progress for its tech workers. Federal service used to mean good and service a source of genuine pride. I went into federal service a long time ago with enthusiasm for change and left pretty damn disillusioned rather quickly.
Could you please share how you discovered said event? I'm curious enough to want to attend one.
Felt like a shady as heck bait and switch. Can't speak to the work they do, but I was not thrilled at their hiring practices.
But first a little about me: CS degree, straight to engineering at blue-chip tech companies, did full stack development, then moved to product management, with a bit of project management experience jumbled in. I'm probably not the guy you want banging out 20K LoC/day on the Linux kernel, but I am the guy who can sketch out both the UI and the architecture of a new product, hold the big picture in his head on the one hand and still speak intelligently to specialists about minute details on the other hand. Fixing all the broken systems in government sounded like a dream job at the time. I thought I was a good fit from everything I heard.
I initially reached out to you, Brandon, around the second big round of press that USDS got -- summer/fall 2014ish. You helpfully put me in touch with J.
J rescheduled our calls twice. It's fine, shit happens. When we did get on the phone though, after explaining the above (with more evidence), she asked me if I wanted to do web-dev with 18F. No, I did not want to do web-dev with 18F, and there's very little in my background to suggest I'd be a good fit for web development. She flat out told me she didn't think I could hack it at USDS, but when I asked where she thought I wasn't a good fit, she backed down and said she'd get an engineer to interview me.
Next thing I know, I get an email from H @ 18F, who I understand is a manager there, and says that J said I wanted to speak to her. Okay, fine, I figure what's the harm in a conversation? I respond that I'd be happy to chat.
A month goes by, no response to 2-3 emails to J (or H).
Finally J responds, so sorry, got busy, etc. Alright, fine, shit happens I guess. The call with the engineer is set up. The engineer and I speak, technical stuff, no phone-coding though (yay!). Seems to have gone well. I give it a week, no sign of life, so I email: nothing. I let two more weeks go by, email again: nothing. Two months later (by now I was just doing this for the curiosity): nothing.
So. Maybe there's political will. Maybe they're bipartisan support. But I doubt you're hiring the best and brightest. Because hiring the best people is job #1 of any leadership team, and the best and brightest know that if this is the hiring process, run by deputy directors of these organizations, with the deputy CTO of the US cc'd on all these emails, and it's _this_ bad...well, it can only be even worse on the inside. And all the desire to give back and serve your country falls apart when you know that organization is going to hamstring you when it comes to the "giving back" and "serving your country" parts of the job description.
Oh, but what about H/18F, you're wondering? Over the course of 8 months (half of that time radio silence), I've scheduled 5 phone calls with her, and she's missed every single one, most of them without a courtesy email saying she'd have to cancel before the call. It got to the point where I was scheduling them during times I knew I'd be driving or waiting around at places because I didn't want to waste anymore hours sitting by a phone that was unlikely to ring.
So yeah, there was no "bait and switch" here, just the "bait and". Not that I'm irritated by this or anything...
I'm seriously heavy into building systems in AWS, architecting solutions, and was really excited about changing the government for the better. I never even got a chance. :(
Please keep in mind we're still operating like a startup that had an engineering mission it's executing on before it had a mission to scale up. We don't trust the existing government hiring process, which means we have to do it ourselves. This means guilting our existing engineers into finding time to review resumes and do interviews instead of fixing something that's on fire. We are trying to hire good people, not just anyone that shoots a resume our way. But we are still a small team. Please don't judge what we're trying to do solely on how well we can get through resumes and interviews. We're working on it, and we have some ideas and plans to do some work to both improve communication and work through the backlog, so don't give up on us yet.
Hiring bright people isn't enough, we have to empower them by building critical mass on impactful projects with executive support. We were focused on creating a team at the VA when you applied (still are, if you finished stapling yourself), but there are other options now that didn't exist then.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Innovation_Fellows
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows
- http://www.jasonshen.com/2014/everything-wanted-know-preside...
- http://www.jasonshen.com/2013/a-new-adventure-working-at-the...
More usefully, they're creating a large number of minor software components and putting them on a Git server.
"Oh cool, maybe some digital natives are going to beable to bring development practices in government into the 2010's. That would be a cool thing to be a part of! ...Wordpress?"
/closetab
It will involve driving adoption of web technology, which WordPress has done incredibly well.
I'd also say that WordPress has/had a rotten core of code, and it's now 11 years old. This guy has only been working on it for 5. If you inherit a code base like that and make huge strides forward, people will still judge you without seeing how much you've cleaned it up. So unless you look at the code base before and after him, you can't judge his engineering skills.
The evaluation period for efforts like these should be a decade or more, that would be a good time to review and see if things have really changed and if the change stuck or if the machine turned out to have too much inertia after all.
We still need someone to build roads and make sure the water stays clean. Arguably, we also need an education system, an oversight of healthcare, a social safety net system and many other things. Working in these capacities helps society in general, and everyday citizens to have better lives.
There are way too many ineffective people in bloated bureaucratic stasis managing these things at the moment, and very much poor and overpriced execution which costs all of us in terms of services received and increased tax burden.
Helping to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these socially important tasks is a very worthwhile use of work time and is not "working for criminals", as the recipients of this work are the citizens of the country.
States do some "good" things like feeding hungry schoolchildren, but never without first committing some "bad". Typically this is extortion (taxation/"revenue"),but originally states are founded on other forms of aggression like military conquest.
Those who perform "good" tasks like being a teacher or web developer can be forgiven totally.
>We still need someone to build roads
This is the #1 laugher for us anarchist libertarians. Here's a lengthy book if you would like to see the case against road socialism.
https://mises.org/library/privatization-roads-and-highways
Poke around that site and I'm sure you can find many more arguments for each of the things you mistakenly think a free society can't provide.
Please realize that the blind alley is in part thinking that government is a business. It isn't and will never be. It's similar to your local mafioso, just a widely accepted one.
"Open, transparent, and efficient" may be a lofty goal, but it's still important for civilians to get involved in moving the government toward that goal.
Nothing is black and white. You seem to be unwilling or unable to see the gray in your chosen area of extremism.
Do you still pay your taxes? Because with the way you talk I would call you a huge hypocrite if you did.
If you really believed what you are saying you would move to another country and give up your US citizenship. Until you take that kind of stand you are just a blowhard.
History disproves that a government (geographic monopoly on arbitration and security) is necessary for maintaining civil order. Of course, you aren't taught this history in state education.
I'm most familiar with the polycentric legal order of medieval Iceland, which lasted longer than the US has so far, so I will point there first.
https://mises.org/library/medieval-iceland-and-absence-gover...
Medieval Ireland is similar but there's less good info. See also the Law Merchant and Zomia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_mercatoria
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/the-undiscov...
>but it's still important for civilians to get involved in moving the government toward that goal.
Actually, I'm quite proud that I don't vote or otherwise trouble myself with electoral politics as a whole.
http://voluntaryist.com/nonvoting/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKANfuq_92U (Myth of the Rational Voter by Caplan)
I think it's important that more people start to recognize government for the evil that it is and build businesses that help keep money out of gov't coffers rather than keep heading down the blind alley you suggest.
If you are an honest person, you'd now would admit you are wrong that gov't is necessary. You just don't know the history yet. Who's really the black and white extremist here? It's okay, I'm familiar that the majority of statists like yourself are oblivious to their Stockholm syndrome and hardened indoctrination. (The rest may be able to see gov't for what it is but lack the creativity to start to work toward alternate solutions.)
You seem pretty set that this gov't thing is necessary. There's at least a few thousand abolitionists like myself ready to pioneer the land a state is willing to cede. Let's go grey baby. Are you even open to the idea you could be wrong?
If you have no population to speak of, and practically everyone is a subsistence farmer/fisherman, and you have a population density of about one person per square mile, then yes, you don't much coordination/government.
We're talking about many centuries before your irrelevant census point. A 2 or 20 person society is relevant on a theoretical level.
Go look on wikipedia for the earliest abolition of slavery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline
>1117: Slavery abolished in Iceland.
After the early rush of settlers, the need for external slaves became unnecessary because the population eclipsed exploitable resources.
Whatever bullshit objection like small population or they are "backwards" subsistence farmers is irrelevant to the fact that civil order was maintained by polycentric law for 3 centuries. Could it work today? Your type won't even allow the experiment so people are forced into schemes like seasteading or "free cities" in Central America.
Bloody as in decades of civil wars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Sturlungs
> Whatever bullshit objection
No need for ad hominems, let your arguments speak.
> like small population or they are "backwards" subsistence farmers is irrelevant to the fact that civil order was maintained by polycentric law for 3 centuries.
Both subsistence farming (e.g. means of production that are by definition not exhibiting division of labor) and an extremly low population density mean that both communication and coordination between people are orders of magnitude smaller than in complex and dense societies. That's pretty much consensus both in macro economics and in sociology.
> Could it work today? Your type won't even allow the experiment
I'm an empirical scientist, so not exactly opposed to experimentation. Has it occured to you that "my type" simply isn't persuaded by your argument?
You're complaining about what happened after people switched over to the statist mindset you simultaneously are trapped in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth
>Both subsistence farming (e.g. means of production that are by definition not exhibiting division of labor) and an extremly low population density mean that both communication and coordination between people are orders of magnitude smaller than in complex and dense societies. That's pretty much consensus both in macro economics and in sociology.
Seems like just another bullshit excuse for an increase in bureaucracy like OP is joining into.
>Has it occured to you that "my type" simply isn't persuaded by your argument?
I don't care. The fact remains that we are not allowed any land to experiment with. Say you aren't opposed to experimentation all you want but let me know when we can experiment and I will care. Your democracy experiment will crumble before this ever happens anyhow so whatever. Democracy was not common outside the US pre-WW1.
The Age of the Sturlungs is what Commonwealth devolved into in a relatively short period. Are you suggesting the Age of the Sturlungs just appeared out of nowhere?
> Seems like just another bullshit excuse for an increase in bureaucracy like OP is joining into.
Ok, apparently you haven't yet read much about economics. Division of labor is a precondition for both wage labor and capital accumulation. If you have neither wage labor nor capital accumulation, you can't have capitalism. It's that simple. You have markets, yes, but everbody had markets for thousands of years. Markets =/= capitalism. Your argument boils down to using a society that is neither culturally nor demographically nor economically similar to present day societies as a role model for present day society. Can you now see why I'm not persuaded?
And again: Ad hominems don't help. You want to persuade the majority to try out a grand libertarian experiment, but you get all worked up because a single person questions your reasoning. It won't work that way.
Unfortunately, I think you're feeding a troll at this point. No amount of logic or reason can undo countless hours stewing in his/her own confirmation bias.
Thank you :)
> Unfortunately, I think you're feeding a troll at this point. No amount of logic or reason can undo countless hours stewing in his/her own confirmation bias.
I suppose you are right. But text-only casual communication gets misinterpreted so easily (e.g. I have the tendency to read agressiveness into texts that are just dense factual answers) that I try to stay calm one answer longer than I'd emotionally do. Works for me :)
The Commonwealth lasted ~290 years. That's all that's relevant is that a polycentric legal order, one paradigmatically different than the statist one that dominates history has worked and could work again.
Your bloody Sturlunga is evidence of the aggressive nature of the statism you propose as "necessary".
>Ok, apparently you haven't yet read much about economics
Sure homie. Update me when you have read Human Action. To me markets are capitalism, but people equivocate on "capitalism" as also the current statist crony corporatism. Wittgenstein teaches us to be clear about what we mean. If you're not familiar with him it's a simple and important lesson.
Can you actually make a real case in teh real world that "government" in some for is not nesercery?
The point is that society functioned well and civil order, viz. not the chaos that "anarchy" is assumed, was maintained for longer than the US has existed. In the grand scale of history medieval Iceland succeeded almost 3x as long as the democracy you surely worship has been unquestioned as superior (just ~100 years now).
>Can you actually make a real case in teh real world that "government" in some for is not nesercery?
Let's gloss over that Lex Mercatoria why don't we. Yeah, I missed mentioning my #2 area of knowledge, Xeer customary law in Somalia. The quality of life there has improved vastly despite the UN insurgency (see proof in my past comments from CIA/World Bank stats).
Wait, I can just hear it now, "warlords". I'll spare myself the time responding to ignorant people like you and just drop one more link. Maybe one day I will be bestowed the honor to silence those who disagree and remain happy in my ignorance without reading.
http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/Legal_System...
and your seriously sugesting that a failed state like Somalia is a good model for civil society.
I used to work for the Uk office of a major Lebanese company and lets say I did not ask to many Q about how we got a kidnapped guy back from beruit - probably some one said well give him back or we have or mates in the phalange make your locality be the next shatilla massacre
Who cares you read sagas or whatever about a Lebanese kidnapping?
And that fact the my then employer had enough pull with some very scary people to get a kidnap victim released from beruit doesn't make you think.
However, I do empathize a lot of the sentiments in the hidden-by-downvote comments on this thread.
Although Nacin will probably never directly support any of the government agencies responsible for torture, drone-murdering innocent civilians in other countries, or the unprecedented surveillance state that has emerged in the wake of the terrorist attacks 14 years ago, he has still willingly become a cog in the machine of the US government.
Whether he manipulates his environment or gets manipulated by it remains to be seen. Hopefully, he is able to do more than make sure the US government's human-rights-violating machines remain well-greased.
For those who are concerned: From my limited interaction with him, I got more of a Jedi vibe than Sith side, if you catch my drift.
The US government does more bad than good.
http://www.livingunderdrones.org/
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/09/17/3568232/the-unit...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
> If you aren't willing to work freely to make your own government better, what good are you as a citizen?
Agreed. That's why I applaud Nacin; I believe he is someone who has enough strength of character to help move the US government towards a better good:evil balance.
> He's willingly started a new job to try to improve people's lives.
Agreed.
> You want to make the government better? You have two major options, voting and joining the government and actually taking responsibility for some tiny piece of it.
Well, they took my voting right away (which means it's not really a right, it's a temporary privilege). :P
No; I'm going to take the path less traveled. I'm going to try and improve everyone's lives, regardless of where they live. Borders be damned. Ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality... none of these things matter at all.
American or not, we're all human.
If I ever help any government, it will be on a city level, not a nation-state level. Which is probably closer to what Andrew Nacin is doing now.
If you don't like that answer, simply walk your own path in life. This is mine.
I think we agree on just about everything else. Local government is good, it always starts local.
I say the federal government is more evil than good. I point to its atrocities and overwhelming apathy towards its own atrocities, while at the same time being wholly insecure about the whole ordeal and classifying everything it can. Why do they have so much to hide if they haven't done anything wrong? :]
I believe the problems are more cultural than just a few bad apples in power.
America will be a lot better off when it returns to being truer to the Constitution, while it is a flawed document, on which our government was founded. We're still moving further away from this; though the rate does ebb regularly. Gay marriage is almost ubiquitous, yet the right to privacy that was interpreted by our judiciary to be implied by the fourth amendment shrinks every year.
If anyone hopes to make change, they can start by actually making sure their local judges are competent and suited for the job. Even if this means running against them in local elections.