Comment by mnky9800n
8 days ago
The great american problem is that American bureaucracy is broken. Whether it's lottery systems for hiking in national parks, fixing roads, healthcare, or hiring across federal employers, all of these require a functioning bureaucracy and there is not one. And so what do Americans do? The left complains the bureaucracy is broken and the right complains the bureaucracy exists. There is little room left for ever fixing the bureaucracy in this situation. It leaves lots of room for people to grab power and change things unilaterally to their own benefit.
American bureaucracy is not broken (but is in the process of being destroyed). Claiming that it is broken is easy rhetoric for charlatans and backed up by a few cherry picked examples.
yeah, the claim that the bureaucracy is the thing that is broken-- can we look at a few things?
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
This all sounds like examples of how the bureaucracy is broken. I suppose a better way to say it is the bureaucracy is unable to respond in any sort of effective way to the problems it is meant to solve because there are far too many people who have the option to change the rules whether it's the president, congressional committee, judges, etc.
Lottery for national park access seems like a great idea, way better than putting a price on it.
The American problem, speaking as an American, is the Americans. Their brains are incredibly smooth, and therefore they fear almost nothing. Famine? War? Environmental catastrophe? Societal collapse? Nah. The only thing they fear at all is someone who sounds like they might have a wrinklier brain than them. That's the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e55Z9bBDG9Y
If it was broken before, it's about to be a lot more broken.