Comment by terminalshort
1 month ago
People who are capable of building things don't go into government. "Bureaucracy" has a connotation of where creativity and innovation goes to die for a reason. The personality type that goes into bureaucracy thinks about this like "why would I put in the effort to build something when I could just use the state monopoly on violence to shake down the suckers who already did all that hard work for me?" Of course they lie to the public, and most importantly to themselves, that they have higher motives, but that is the underlying logic.
At it's worse yes, at it's best absolutely not.
The role of government, at it's best, is to ensure the system as a whole benefits the democratic majority as a whole.
The argument that unregulated free markets will deliver has a key flaw - people who work in private companies don't want endless free and fair competition, especially if they are currently in the lead, they are also incentized to dump as much of the true cost of what they are doing on to other people.
So companies will chose cartels and monopolies over competition, choose pollution over responsibility, offload infrastructure and people costs onto others etc, minimise tax rates ( avoid paying for stuff they use ) etc.
Assuming an unregulated market is best is like assuming a football game is better if there are no rules. Turns out cheating is easier than competing almost everytime - and without government to set and enforce the rules you end up with pollution, crime ( people decided the rules don't work for them ), stagnation, and a feudal society.
Take something as simple as rule of law. A free market approach to that is there is no law, everyone negotiates each interaction and enforces their will with personal force. Turns out that's both exhausting and chaotic - much better to collectively agree what is legal or not and then have collective enforcement.
Sure it's slower to change, sometimes unfair, but pretty much every group of people in every country in the world has evolved a system of government rather than go with anarchy.
So good government is all about building - building complex systems - constantly adjusting them as people try and game them - that result in optimal outcomes for the majority of people.
> People who are capable of building things don't go into government.
Spoken like an American who doesn't know what government actually does.
Well in our case what it does is mostly get in the way of building things