Comment by bboygravity
7 months ago
This is what Javier Milei means when he says that everything politicians touch turns to shit and therefor government should be minimal.
7 months ago
This is what Javier Milei means when he says that everything politicians touch turns to shit and therefor government should be minimal.
Isn’t that a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Many regulations serve to protect individuals and the environment, both of which might otherwise be overlooked in favor of corporate profits fighting in the free market. I'm afraid that when advocates of minimal government push their agenda, they often envision a level of reduction far beyond what most people would find acceptable. In situations like the one under discussion, I believe improving the regulation would be a better approach than eliminating it entirely.
While I agree with your general sentiment I think that there is a possible type of government where we are no-longer forced to vote for individual humans (or indeed groups of humans: political parties) but can instead vote on the actual ideas/policies.
It might even be possible now to combine nuanced perspectives/responses to proposed policies from millions of people together!? I think it's not that unreasonable to suggest that kind of thing nowadays, I think there's precedent for it too even though stuff like how-wikipedia-works isn't really ideal, (even though it's somewhat an example of the main idea!).
This way, the public servants (including politicians) can mainly just take care of making sure the ideas that the people vote-for get implemented! (like all the lower tiers of government currently do - just extend it to the top level too!) I don't think we should give individuals that power any more!
The main problem is overwhelming voters, for a vote to be meaningful the voter has to understand the propositions that they vote for. Given the amount of legislation passed it is quite unreasonable to expect everyone to do the due diligence for every vote.
What might make such a system work in practice is to only let a small randomly selected group of people vote for each issue. You still get a similar representation as a full vote, but with each person having much fewer votes to attend to it isn't overwhelming.
Cynical viewpoint, downvote if you must: It is the dream of right wing populists everywhere to demolish government bloat, leaving just the bits that are actually useful.
But: https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/seoc2/1996_1997/ad...
Any bureaucracy evolves, ultimately, to serve and protect itself. So the populist boss snips at the easy, but actually useful parts: Social safety nets, environmental regulations, etc. Whereas the core bureaucracy, the one that should really be snipped, has gotten so good at protecting itself that it remains untouchable. So in the end the percentage of useless administratium is actually up, and the government, as a whole, still bloated but even less functional. Just another "unintended consequences" example.
We'll see if Argentina can do better than this.
In my locale, every time there are budget cuts or cost increases it is the popular and the visible government functions which get the axe. I.e. The parks department has four layers of management and manages a ton of no-bid contracts, but swimming pools will be closed rather than building cheaper in-house expertise. I guess it's better than deferring essential maintenance, but somehow I suspect maintenance is also already being overly deferred. One wishes they would take an axe to Parkinson's law of growth instead.