Comment by myrmidon
1 year ago
"The government" is not actually accruing wealth in pretty much any western democracy-- in fact the exact opposite is happening everywhere.
To me it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much. Since the emergence of modern nation states, government responsibilities have grown tremendously, and mostly for good reason:
- Infrastructure basically went from dirt roads to highways/railways/airports
- Tremendously higher benchmarks for services/regulation (education, pensions, food safety, crime prevention, drinking/groundwater quality, lead pollution, mining/heavy industry regulation, healthcare/-regulation)
A lot of those things are new enough that I would argue we are still stabilizing on their total costs, and current government budgets (high AND red literally everywhere) are basically humanity finding out that all those things are not free.
But I would also argue that for a big majority of people, this is still a rather decent deal; I would rather pay current (or even higher) levels of taxes than to suffer from lead poisoning, have children crippled from quackery/insufficiently tested medication or needing to pay protection money to the mob.
But I'm quite curious: What do you think is the problematic part of government growth? Do you think that Doge, specifically, is successful in identifying and quelling it?
> "The government" is not actually accruing wealth
I tend to agree with that. But there's no doubt it is dissipating vast amounts of wealth.
> it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much
There's a vast amount of waste in government spending, and waste as a result of heavy regulation. If you're really interested,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
I do agree with you that there is a lot of overhead and waste in the healthcare industry and government in general.
But this insight is, to me, just not really actionable.
Almost every large organisation seems to end up with a good amount of bloat/overhead sooner or later, and this even includes former super-lean and super-focused enterprises (Intel, Google, AWS, ...), so I don't see how you could ever sidestep this problem completely with the government.
Just cutting regulators and government responsibilities in general also seems a really bad idea to me. Reading that article, how many of its complaints would be solved by fully deregulating and letting the market take care of things?
1) Avoidable infections exacerbated by laziness/cost cutting
2) Lack of price/cost transparency
3) Healthcare costs being wasted on advertising/middlemen
4) Doctors specializing in fields that pay well instead of the ones that are most needed to improve health outcomes
I'd argue that none of those would be improved by switching to unregulated private healthcare, and a bunch of them would very likely get worse.
Another thing to consider when cutting regulation are huge possible negative externalities in general.
Just take leaded gasoline as an easy example (because the bill for CO2 emissions is not in yet). The industry basically "self-regulated" until the 60s (and only because it became infeasible to continue hiding lead toxicity by paying or threatening scientists, which it had done for the previous decades): Total costs/damages were enormous-- probably millions of lifeyears lost, but industry/shareholders did not pay a dime after reaping the profits.
How could drastic cuts in regulations avoid disastrous outcomes like that?
Every large organization does indeed accumulate bloat/overhead sooner or later. For a profit making company, this means it loses its competitiveness and then falls. For government, this means it gets a bigger budget.
The leaded gasoline example is also a disaster. That does not generalize to every regulation being good. For example, regulations prevent victims of the Palisades fire from rebuilding. For another example, rent control.
Reading the article, the bit about Lasik eye surgery resulting in major reductions in cost is pretty illustrative.
Some years back, Frontline did an episode on dental care fraud. It seems the government set up a program to pay dentists to do major dental operations on poor people. Clinics then set up solely to do major dental operations on poor people, and raked in the government money. The trouble was, those people did not need dental operations. Frontline's "solution" was to propose heavy regulation. That won't work, either, because medical fraud to get government money is rampant and pervasive.
You might also consider the software business, which has pretty much zero regulation. It is also a gigantic engine of prosperity in the US, despite having driven costs down to literally zero. There have been many proposals to regulate it, but fortunately none have managed to do so.
2 replies →