Comment by vkou
8 hours ago
I assure you, in most democracies, most people are jerked around by other people acting in bad faith far more often than their government acting in bad faith.
Landlords, tenants, vendors, business and former romantic partners, clients, banks, even your local gym is way more likely to try to fuck you over than the government is.
The government is just people. Even before the current fiasco, the government had varying degrees of incompetence and malice, and if you're poor you can't do anything about it since the government is presumed to have been operating in good faith and you can't afford a lawyer or the time off work to try to fix it pro se.
There is no such presumption in court. If you've been wronged you can get recompense regardless of their intent.
I'd invite you to ask a few poor people what happened the last time the government "definitely sent" some important document or another in the mail.
If a governmental employee gets the address wrong, gets the name wrong, accidentally knocks the mail in the trash, lazily marks the job as complete without sending anything, etc, the burden shifts to the poor person to prove not just that they didn't receive the mail but that the sending office didn't behave correctly.
Other cases behave similarly. In a he-said/she-said, the government wins.