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Your caricature of government may be pleasing, but it bears very little resemblance to reality. Government is inefficient, and often wasteful, but not because

Your caricature of government may be pleasing, but it bears very little resemblance to reality. Government is inefficient, and often wasteful, but not because they don't care about wasting taxpayers' money. They're just (often) bad at spending it responsibly. And public sector employees are often the first target of any politician elected on a promise of "getting rid of waste".

crdoconnor 11y ago
>Government is inefficient So are Fortune 500s. It's in the nature of large bureaucracies, not governments specifically.
- redthrowaway 11y ago
  Exactly, and government is the largest bureaucracy out there. My point is that people, particularly libertarians, like to ascribe to malfeasance government behaviours that are better explained by poorly designed systems and misaligned incentives. There are very few government employees and elected officials actively looking to screw over taxpayers. Almost every single public employee I've spoken to has expressed how much they care about the job they do and how constrained they are by bureaucracy and lack of resources. And elected officials are overwhelmingly concerned citizens who want to do everything they can to help their constituents. The fact that they often fail to do so has much more to do with maladaptive systems and perverse incentives than it does with the motivations of the people involved. It's tragically comic that the people on this site, who should be hyper aware of the effects of bad architecture on an system's output, are so quick to write it off as a cause and instead resort to facile ad hominems about the people in question. You don't blame the silicon when your app becomes unresponsive. It's weird that we do so for countries.
  - jerf 11y ago
    No, I'm an equal opportunity "big system" hater. Hating Wal-Mart but thinking the US Government is the bee's knees makes no sense to me.

crdoconnor 11y ago

>Government is inefficient So are Fortune 500s. It's in the nature of large bureaucracies, not governments specifically.

redthrowaway 11y ago
Exactly, and government is the largest bureaucracy out there. My point is that people, particularly libertarians, like to ascribe to malfeasance government behaviours that are better explained by poorly designed systems and misaligned incentives. There are very few government employees and elected officials actively looking to screw over taxpayers. Almost every single public employee I've spoken to has expressed how much they care about the job they do and how constrained they are by bureaucracy and lack of resources. And elected officials are overwhelmingly concerned citizens who want to do everything they can to help their constituents. The fact that they often fail to do so has much more to do with maladaptive systems and perverse incentives than it does with the motivations of the people involved. It's tragically comic that the people on this site, who should be hyper aware of the effects of bad architecture on an system's output, are so quick to write it off as a cause and instead resort to facile ad hominems about the people in question. You don't blame the silicon when your app becomes unresponsive. It's weird that we do so for countries.
- jerf 11y ago
  No, I'm an equal opportunity "big system" hater. Hating Wal-Mart but thinking the US Government is the bee's knees makes no sense to me.