11 ms·

“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing

by j_m_b 8y ago

“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.” -Milton Friedman

porpoisely 8y ago
I personally enjoyed this quote from Ken Burns' Civil War. "You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask". -- Jim Fisk ( War Profiteer )
0xcde4c3db 8y ago
That's why many mature governments have an office whose job it is to care about those things, e.g. [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
- LarryDarrell 8y ago
  It's much easier to quote Milton Friedman and wave your hands, though.
- Mary-Jane 8y ago
  True, but you're not taking into account the government budgeting model. Organizations in government budgets' are based on last year's budget. If the OU spends last year's budget or more, their budget is increased (because they account for inflation). If they spend less, their budget is decreased. In other words, there is a built in incentive to spend money, and anyone can find ways to justify spending money "to improve their OU". GAOs merely verify the paperwork is in order. Don't misunderstand me. This isn't an argument against government; it's an argument against this budgeting model. There has to be a way they to structure private sector budgeting efficiency into public organizations.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    Large corporations stuff from this problem too, with middle managers maxing their budgets out on mousepads or whatever to make sure their departments budget doesn't get cut. Its just that their better at hiding it. It's a very pervasive problem; I'm sure whoever figures out a finance structure that minimizes it without breaking anything else will win a novel prize
AbrahamParangi 8y ago
This is a good quote and I like it, but it's funny- I feel like what this quote best demonstrates is a basic difference in conscientiousness between the Chicago school folks and the Keynes folks. If I buy a birthday present for someone, I care very much about the content of the present.
- ptero 8y ago
  I felt the same way on first reading, but then decided that I misinterpreted "someone" to mean "someone really close to me": spouse, kids, parents, etc. This is similar to buying things for myself. I believe in MF quote "someone" is better described as "someone you do not personally know or maybe see once". A model for that is buying a gift for a Yankee Swap party. Or for a child I do not know: something to cheer them up, but as I do not know if (s)he likes dolls or trucks I can go with a safe, generic choice, e.g., a book. That is, I am still trying to do a good thing, but am not too worried that I will guess incorrectly.
  - Retra 8y ago
    Seems that this is the problem empathy was meant to solve.
    - ptero 8y ago
      I am not sure I understand. My claim is the situation where you spend your money on someone else is not that "I do not care" (which the empathy can help solve), but "I do not know", so I will make an optimal choice: decent gift at reasonable cost; paying more can give poor ROI since I do not know what exactly to spend more money on.
      - Retra 8y ago
        What I'm saying is that empathy is completely useless... other than the fact that it allows you to turn "someone I don't care about" into "someone I don't know, but care about enough to make meaningful sacrifices for." So the whole point of empathy is that it allows you to avoid a frame of mind where you're spending other peoples' money on things that don't benefit anybody.
enraged_camel 8y ago
It is a funny quote, but obviously not true. Anyone who has worked in, and for, government will tell you that: "And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government." Is 100% incorrect. In fact, much of the bureaucracy we have in government is used for ensuring these types of things don't happen. It's why there are committees, reviews, approval chains out the wazoo, etc.
- cascom 8y ago
  My experience is that because we can’t trust people in government to act responsibly, we create these committees/reviews/approvals ensuring that government moves slowly and ineffectively
- arcbyte 8y ago
  It's a great generality, but it's not only 100% correct, your example of bureaucracy PROVES it is correct. Those committees, reviews, and approval chains are just distributed responsibility mechanisms to remove the responsibility to think critically about the entire expenditure, which is Friedman's point. 10 people thinking about narrow, nonoverlapping aspects of a large thing will never be as effective as less people considering all aspects of that large thing.
  - eastWestMath 8y ago
    Just because more than one person/group of people looks at something does not mean they are all looking at non-overlapping aspects of a large thing.
  - pesmhey 8y ago
    Ten functions performing narrow, non-overlapping aspects of a large program is pretty decent design, so that you can change/update/troubleshoot one function without affecting too much of your whole system. Your alternative has been tried and fails when you have to replace that all-considering function with another at the end of its life and the other one isn’t so good. It’s a less robust system. Bureaucracy isn’t inherently bad, it’s just like, a model of designing complex systems.
adwhit 8y ago
I’m sold, let’s get rid of the part of the government that costs the most and delivers the least. I’m talking about the military, of course.
- jki275 8y ago
  Military in the US is 18% of the budget. SS and medicare are something like 70%. If you want to live in a country without a military there are a bunch of them. I wouldn't personally want to live in any of them, but of course everyone is free to do as they see fit.
  - bufferoverflow 8y ago
    Switzerland has no military, it's not that bad.
    - louisswiss 8y ago
      Switzerland definitely does have a military.
      - ceejayoz 8y ago
        Fun fact, though: their air force has office hours. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swiss-air-force-ethiopian-airlines-hijacking-office-hours https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swis...
    - thecopy 8y ago
      Switzerland has mandatory conscription.
    - dagw 8y ago
      Switzerland not only has a military, it has mandatory military service for all males.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      Switzerland actually even has military ships. [1] [1] Patrol boats of the Grenzwachtkorps.
dalbasal 8y ago
Friedman had a talent for conveying these ideas simply. The problem with these economicist "stories," as they call them, is that people (including economists themselves) believe them too much. Once stories like this are embedded in the way we think, we constantly see ways of interpreting the world in a reinforcing way. Every case of inefficiency is found to be an example of principal-agent problems. Not specifically a Friedman problem or a laissez-faire problem.
- collinf 8y ago
  It's so true. People take these stories as hard truth, when in fact many studies on economics (and social sciences in general) are hard to replicate. [1] 1. https://www.nber.org/papers/w13026 https://www.nber.org/papers/w13026
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  > believe them too much I definitely agree. The public reaction to how "someone else's money is spent on someone else" is sometimes very passionate. e.g. feelings about government funding for the proposed border wall, support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, Planned Parenthood, prisons, police military-grade weaponry, etc At the very least, in cases where value systems and ethical considerations come into play, people are extremely concerned about how government spends other people's money on other people. Furthermore, people have efficiency concerns: plenty of people in big cities like Los Angeles are very concerned about the way the city spends its money in general, given the state of the roads and streets, levels of crime and traffic, mediocre education, etc
AsyncAwait 8y ago
Friedman's quote is particularly ironic considering his Chicago Boys were particularly notorious for "spending somebody else’s money on themselves" by shifting public money to their own pockets, often by awarding ridiculous contracts.
arandr0x 8y ago
I'm not sure what it says about me or Friedman, but if I'm choosing to buy someone a gift I don't care about the cost but I will attempt to make it something they like, and refrain from gift-giving if I don't think I can do that. (Or give money, I suppose.) On the other hand, when spending other people's money on myself, for example lunches for business travel, I am incredibly cost conscious. I've skipped dinner a couple times because I felt the airport meals were too expensive. (The same was true when I was a child and spending my parents' money.) Clearly they should put me in charge of governement budgets.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  Do you work for the Boy Scouts? I am not going to spend in excess, but if a company is paying for me to fly somewhere, I doubt a $30 airport meal is going to break them. Now there have been times on site with a client, and I had a $120 per diem, where I might eat breakfast and lunch from a vending machine so that I can have a nice dinner, but I would never skip a meal at an airport if I had enough money left for it, and even if I didn't, I'd still charge the company and hope it flies under the radar. Again $30 isn't going to bankrupt any company that can afford to fly you around.
  - Uehreka 8y ago
    I'd argue there's a big difference between my company paying for dinner and a friend or family member taking me out to dinner. In the latter case I'm definitely not going to run up a huge bill. Looking back to the quote, I suppose the definition of "someone else" can mean a lot.
    - jermaustin1 8y ago
      I wish I had more friends like you, then ;)
    - arandr0x 8y ago
      Same, when out to dinner with friends, if I pay for everyone I will nag them to order the steak and every extra they might want, and if someone is paying for me I will try to pick something worth less than what they would have picked for themselves. I'm pretty sure they used to make menus with no prices for people like me. (It is common for my friends to also be generous and constantly try to get people to order more when they're the one paying. So I don't think this is a case of me being a Christlike figure of self-denial and the world being full of sharks. Economists just may not know enough good people.)
texmex20 8y ago
I like this quote ... and agree with the spirit of it. That said, some central governing body does need to make sure certain needs of the community are taken care of. That way, we ensure that the whole community is taken care of and we're not in an every man for himself scenario where the "strong" prevail and the "weak" die off. When the government provides military to protect it's citizens, it does so for all citizens, not just the rich, not just the city dwellers. I guess the question is -to what else does this apply and to what extent?
- patricius 8y ago
  Can we really say that government changes this? The powerful in this case is government itself and lobbyists. They are taken care of. We do not ensure in general that the weak are taken care of. Furthermore, government uses the military for anything else than the protection of its citizens. How many of US military campaigns are for protection and how many is to support the military industrial complex?
kaitai 8y ago
This is very elegant, and encapsulates the problem with America. Well, many other countries as well, but certainly us, America. Not government -- but our conception of "ourselves". HN occasionally has articles about education and the comparison of, say, Finnish education and American education comes up. I am firmly of the opinions that Finnish education works, when it works, because it is a service that the population is providing for themselves via government. It is seen as spending their own money on themselves. These other social services are seen similarly: people are getting what they paid for. And they (Finns, in this example) are conscious of it: in large part, I lay this lingering national consciousness of the value of government at the Karelian refugee resettlement of the 1940s. My inner armchair historian/anthropologist sees this massive national effort from family level through the top of government as providing a bit of national glue that also led to feelings of agency and efficacy among the population. The sense that government takes our money and gives it to someone else, or steals it, pervades the US discourse. Our efforts are focused on avoiding taxes, lessening taxes, eliminating services for those undeserving others. We don't want to pay for other peoples' kids; they shouldn't have had them and haven't they heard of birth control, which they should also be able to obtain on their own. Personal responsibility is king. It subtly pervades even how we teach reading -- if you read [1], you see that teachers were taught that kids learn from their parents reading to them, and it's also just a matter of parenting choices and personal responsibility. From the family to top levels of government in the US, there's now an anti-glue, the story that government is an adversary, that it's a wasteful theft of honest peoples' money. They are both just stories that make themselves true through our behavior, the behavior of government officials, citizens, and contractors. [1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-a...
- nonbel 8y ago
  >"The sense that government takes our money and gives it to someone else" If something else was going on, then taxes would be voluntary...
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    An alternative would be a country full of people so similar to you that the average person would feel like their countrymen might as well be them. If the entire US was 100% aligned with your own politics then taxes wouldn't be very burdensome. If my political faction ran the country like a dictatorship, I wouldn't mind them taking my money, because they'd spend it on getting me what I want (which may include "a better world," prioritized according to my subjective view of which world problems are the worst). However because there is more than one political faction in power, the money taken from me will sometimes be spent on things I don't want, including things that I am actually opposed to. Clearly the solution is either cough "greater unity," or the more practical answer which is having minimal taxes to fund only the lowest common denominator of services that everyone wants.
leejoramo 8y ago
This goes along with another current top story on HN. I wonder whose money Verizon spent to purchase Yahoo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662822
DSingularity 8y ago
Eloquently put but I do not appreciate the conclusion the rhetoric is driving. It is not impossible to structure these efforts in way which maintains effeciency and performance:$. How? Accountability and a payout which rewards good performance and punishes bad performance.
crispyambulance 8y ago
I don't know how much Milton Friedman applies here. It's not like the government is being wantonly careless. They are investigating, after all. This is partly a consequence of the bidding process and the push to keep costs as low as possible-- there could also be a bit of crony-ism here. These kinds of stories usually start out with some bidders putting together a killer power point deck and making a pitch, just like that LLC of TWO people that won that disastrous contract to rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid, or those guys that the movie "War Dogs" is about. Sometimes they're upstanding folks who do a good job, sometimes they're fraudsters, sometimes they mean well but just can't deliver, sometimes they deliver but with comical cost overruns (name your favorite defense contractor).
- saas_sam 8y ago
  > It's not like the government is being wantonly careless. They are investigating, after all. So, if someone does something seemingly egregiously careless, but they investigate after being found out, that nullifies the carelessness, in your mind? I think we may agree to disagree on that point.
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    Well, the government is made up of humans after all. These things are _always_ going to happen. The questions now are who screwed up the oversight, whether or not there was fraud or crony-ism, and what actions can be taken against this contractor in terms of cancelling/auditing their other contracts.
everdev 8y ago
And if the government were a business with actual competition, no one would do business with them. It's a great example of how monopolies reduce quality and increase waste.
delecti 8y ago
Maybe I'm just too much of an idealist, but I don't understand a perception of the government that isn't in the first category. It's my money and I'm reaping the benefit, both through direct benefits and through the overall improvement of society. And I realize that it's partly that not everyone in government shares that sentiment, which is probably where a big part of the problem comes in, but that's another thing I don't understand. How can people not care so much?
danzig13 8y ago
Having worked as an actual Fed, I think there is a bit more complication to this. I know that I and the people around me worked hard to do a good job on our project. I would hire any of those people. I also saw a great deal of the government is run by MVPs built by Feds on their own initiative. On the other hand, the projects (including ours) I saw to replace those MVPs were largely staffed by incompetent or unfocused contractors, and I believe that is where a huge amount of waste comes in. These contractors are once removed from even government and the waste results from this Milton Friedman push for privatization of government functions to organizations just trying to log billable hours.
simonsarris 8y ago
Someone wondered publicly how the economics of Starbuck's recently-announced coffee delivery service are going to work. They don't think it will. But it's probably going to be very easy easy. Police or Fire or other public departments order the coffee every day which gets buried as an office expense and taxpayers foot the bill. The bureaucracies are happy. Starbucks is happy. No one else, uh, notices.
jondubois 8y ago
It's not true because when you spend somebody else's money on a third party, that third party can pay you back with future favors so there is a huge long term career incentive for you to give out a lot.
OzzyB 8y ago
“Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest... The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms: greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.” -Gordon Gekko
HillaryBriss 8y ago
> ... if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. what about when you're spending your parents' money on a cell phone for them?

by j_m_b 8y ago

porpoisely 8y ago

I personally enjoyed this quote from Ken Burns' Civil War. "You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask". -- Jim Fisk ( War Profiteer )

0xcde4c3db 8y ago

That's why many mature governments have an office whose job it is to care about those things, e.g. [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...

LarryDarrell 8y ago
It's much easier to quote Milton Friedman and wave your hands, though.
Mary-Jane 8y ago
True, but you're not taking into account the government budgeting model. Organizations in government budgets' are based on last year's budget. If the OU spends last year's budget or more, their budget is increased (because they account for inflation). If they spend less, their budget is decreased. In other words, there is a built in incentive to spend money, and anyone can find ways to justify spending money "to improve their OU". GAOs merely verify the paperwork is in order. Don't misunderstand me. This isn't an argument against government; it's an argument against this budgeting model. There has to be a way they to structure private sector budgeting efficiency into public organizations.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Large corporations stuff from this problem too, with middle managers maxing their budgets out on mousepads or whatever to make sure their departments budget doesn't get cut. Its just that their better at hiding it. It's a very pervasive problem; I'm sure whoever figures out a finance structure that minimizes it without breaking anything else will win a novel prize

AbrahamParangi 8y ago

This is a good quote and I like it, but it's funny- I feel like what this quote best demonstrates is a basic difference in conscientiousness between the Chicago school folks and the Keynes folks. If I buy a birthday present for someone, I care very much about the content of the present.

ptero 8y ago
I felt the same way on first reading, but then decided that I misinterpreted "someone" to mean "someone really close to me": spouse, kids, parents, etc. This is similar to buying things for myself. I believe in MF quote "someone" is better described as "someone you do not personally know or maybe see once". A model for that is buying a gift for a Yankee Swap party. Or for a child I do not know: something to cheer them up, but as I do not know if (s)he likes dolls or trucks I can go with a safe, generic choice, e.g., a book. That is, I am still trying to do a good thing, but am not too worried that I will guess incorrectly.
- Retra 8y ago
  Seems that this is the problem empathy was meant to solve.
  - ptero 8y ago
    I am not sure I understand. My claim is the situation where you spend your money on someone else is not that "I do not care" (which the empathy can help solve), but "I do not know", so I will make an optimal choice: decent gift at reasonable cost; paying more can give poor ROI since I do not know what exactly to spend more money on.
    - Retra 8y ago
      What I'm saying is that empathy is completely useless... other than the fact that it allows you to turn "someone I don't care about" into "someone I don't know, but care about enough to make meaningful sacrifices for." So the whole point of empathy is that it allows you to avoid a frame of mind where you're spending other peoples' money on things that don't benefit anybody.

enraged_camel 8y ago

It is a funny quote, but obviously not true. Anyone who has worked in, and for, government will tell you that: "And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government." Is 100% incorrect. In fact, much of the bureaucracy we have in government is used for ensuring these types of things don't happen. It's why there are committees, reviews, approval chains out the wazoo, etc.

cascom 8y ago
My experience is that because we can’t trust people in government to act responsibly, we create these committees/reviews/approvals ensuring that government moves slowly and ineffectively
arcbyte 8y ago
It's a great generality, but it's not only 100% correct, your example of bureaucracy PROVES it is correct. Those committees, reviews, and approval chains are just distributed responsibility mechanisms to remove the responsibility to think critically about the entire expenditure, which is Friedman's point. 10 people thinking about narrow, nonoverlapping aspects of a large thing will never be as effective as less people considering all aspects of that large thing.
- eastWestMath 8y ago
  Just because more than one person/group of people looks at something does not mean they are all looking at non-overlapping aspects of a large thing.
- pesmhey 8y ago
  Ten functions performing narrow, non-overlapping aspects of a large program is pretty decent design, so that you can change/update/troubleshoot one function without affecting too much of your whole system. Your alternative has been tried and fails when you have to replace that all-considering function with another at the end of its life and the other one isn’t so good. It’s a less robust system. Bureaucracy isn’t inherently bad, it’s just like, a model of designing complex systems.

adwhit 8y ago

I’m sold, let’s get rid of the part of the government that costs the most and delivers the least. I’m talking about the military, of course.

jki275 8y ago
Military in the US is 18% of the budget. SS and medicare are something like 70%. If you want to live in a country without a military there are a bunch of them. I wouldn't personally want to live in any of them, but of course everyone is free to do as they see fit.
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  Switzerland has no military, it's not that bad.
  - louisswiss 8y ago
    Switzerland definitely does have a military.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      Fun fact, though: their air force has office hours. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swiss-air-force-ethiopian-airlines-hijacking-office-hours https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swis...
  - thecopy 8y ago
    Switzerland has mandatory conscription.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Switzerland not only has a military, it has mandatory military service for all males.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Switzerland actually even has military ships. [1] [1] Patrol boats of the Grenzwachtkorps.

dalbasal 8y ago

Friedman had a talent for conveying these ideas simply. The problem with these economicist "stories," as they call them, is that people (including economists themselves) believe them too much. Once stories like this are embedded in the way we think, we constantly see ways of interpreting the world in a reinforcing way. Every case of inefficiency is found to be an example of principal-agent problems. Not specifically a Friedman problem or a laissez-faire problem.

collinf 8y ago
It's so true. People take these stories as hard truth, when in fact many studies on economics (and social sciences in general) are hard to replicate. [1] 1. https://www.nber.org/papers/w13026 https://www.nber.org/papers/w13026
HillaryBriss 8y ago
> believe them too much I definitely agree. The public reaction to how "someone else's money is spent on someone else" is sometimes very passionate. e.g. feelings about government funding for the proposed border wall, support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, Planned Parenthood, prisons, police military-grade weaponry, etc At the very least, in cases where value systems and ethical considerations come into play, people are extremely concerned about how government spends other people's money on other people. Furthermore, people have efficiency concerns: plenty of people in big cities like Los Angeles are very concerned about the way the city spends its money in general, given the state of the roads and streets, levels of crime and traffic, mediocre education, etc

AsyncAwait 8y ago

Friedman's quote is particularly ironic considering his Chicago Boys were particularly notorious for "spending somebody else’s money on themselves" by shifting public money to their own pockets, often by awarding ridiculous contracts.

arandr0x 8y ago

I'm not sure what it says about me or Friedman, but if I'm choosing to buy someone a gift I don't care about the cost but I will attempt to make it something they like, and refrain from gift-giving if I don't think I can do that. (Or give money, I suppose.) On the other hand, when spending other people's money on myself, for example lunches for business travel, I am incredibly cost conscious. I've skipped dinner a couple times because I felt the airport meals were too expensive. (The same was true when I was a child and spending my parents' money.) Clearly they should put me in charge of governement budgets.

jermaustin1 8y ago
Do you work for the Boy Scouts? I am not going to spend in excess, but if a company is paying for me to fly somewhere, I doubt a $30 airport meal is going to break them. Now there have been times on site with a client, and I had a $120 per diem, where I might eat breakfast and lunch from a vending machine so that I can have a nice dinner, but I would never skip a meal at an airport if I had enough money left for it, and even if I didn't, I'd still charge the company and hope it flies under the radar. Again $30 isn't going to bankrupt any company that can afford to fly you around.
- Uehreka 8y ago
  I'd argue there's a big difference between my company paying for dinner and a friend or family member taking me out to dinner. In the latter case I'm definitely not going to run up a huge bill. Looking back to the quote, I suppose the definition of "someone else" can mean a lot.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    I wish I had more friends like you, then ;)
  - arandr0x 8y ago
    Same, when out to dinner with friends, if I pay for everyone I will nag them to order the steak and every extra they might want, and if someone is paying for me I will try to pick something worth less than what they would have picked for themselves. I'm pretty sure they used to make menus with no prices for people like me. (It is common for my friends to also be generous and constantly try to get people to order more when they're the one paying. So I don't think this is a case of me being a Christlike figure of self-denial and the world being full of sharks. Economists just may not know enough good people.)

texmex20 8y ago

I like this quote ... and agree with the spirit of it. That said, some central governing body does need to make sure certain needs of the community are taken care of. That way, we ensure that the whole community is taken care of and we're not in an every man for himself scenario where the "strong" prevail and the "weak" die off. When the government provides military to protect it's citizens, it does so for all citizens, not just the rich, not just the city dwellers. I guess the question is -to what else does this apply and to what extent?

patricius 8y ago
Can we really say that government changes this? The powerful in this case is government itself and lobbyists. They are taken care of. We do not ensure in general that the weak are taken care of. Furthermore, government uses the military for anything else than the protection of its citizens. How many of US military campaigns are for protection and how many is to support the military industrial complex?

kaitai 8y ago

This is very elegant, and encapsulates the problem with America. Well, many other countries as well, but certainly us, America. Not government -- but our conception of "ourselves". HN occasionally has articles about education and the comparison of, say, Finnish education and American education comes up. I am firmly of the opinions that Finnish education works, when it works, because it is a service that the population is providing for themselves via government. It is seen as spending their own money on themselves. These other social services are seen similarly: people are getting what they paid for. And they (Finns, in this example) are conscious of it: in large part, I lay this lingering national consciousness of the value of government at the Karelian refugee resettlement of the 1940s. My inner armchair historian/anthropologist sees this massive national effort from family level through the top of government as providing a bit of national glue that also led to feelings of agency and efficacy among the population. The sense that government takes our money and gives it to someone else, or steals it, pervades the US discourse. Our efforts are focused on avoiding taxes, lessening taxes, eliminating services for those undeserving others. We don't want to pay for other peoples' kids; they shouldn't have had them and haven't they heard of birth control, which they should also be able to obtain on their own. Personal responsibility is king. It subtly pervades even how we teach reading -- if you read [1], you see that teachers were taught that kids learn from their parents reading to them, and it's also just a matter of parenting choices and personal responsibility. From the family to top levels of government in the US, there's now an anti-glue, the story that government is an adversary, that it's a wasteful theft of honest peoples' money. They are both just stories that make themselves true through our behavior, the behavior of government officials, citizens, and contractors. [1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-a...

nonbel 8y ago
>"The sense that government takes our money and gives it to someone else" If something else was going on, then taxes would be voluntary...
- whatshisface 8y ago
  An alternative would be a country full of people so similar to you that the average person would feel like their countrymen might as well be them. If the entire US was 100% aligned with your own politics then taxes wouldn't be very burdensome. If my political faction ran the country like a dictatorship, I wouldn't mind them taking my money, because they'd spend it on getting me what I want (which may include "a better world," prioritized according to my subjective view of which world problems are the worst). However because there is more than one political faction in power, the money taken from me will sometimes be spent on things I don't want, including things that I am actually opposed to. Clearly the solution is either cough "greater unity," or the more practical answer which is having minimal taxes to fund only the lowest common denominator of services that everyone wants.

leejoramo 8y ago

This goes along with another current top story on HN. I wonder whose money Verizon spent to purchase Yahoo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662822

DSingularity 8y ago

Eloquently put but I do not appreciate the conclusion the rhetoric is driving. It is not impossible to structure these efforts in way which maintains effeciency and performance:$. How? Accountability and a payout which rewards good performance and punishes bad performance.

crispyambulance 8y ago

I don't know how much Milton Friedman applies here. It's not like the government is being wantonly careless. They are investigating, after all. This is partly a consequence of the bidding process and the push to keep costs as low as possible-- there could also be a bit of crony-ism here. These kinds of stories usually start out with some bidders putting together a killer power point deck and making a pitch, just like that LLC of TWO people that won that disastrous contract to rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid, or those guys that the movie "War Dogs" is about. Sometimes they're upstanding folks who do a good job, sometimes they're fraudsters, sometimes they mean well but just can't deliver, sometimes they deliver but with comical cost overruns (name your favorite defense contractor).

saas_sam 8y ago
> It's not like the government is being wantonly careless. They are investigating, after all. So, if someone does something seemingly egregiously careless, but they investigate after being found out, that nullifies the carelessness, in your mind? I think we may agree to disagree on that point.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  Well, the government is made up of humans after all. These things are _always_ going to happen. The questions now are who screwed up the oversight, whether or not there was fraud or crony-ism, and what actions can be taken against this contractor in terms of cancelling/auditing their other contracts.

everdev 8y ago

And if the government were a business with actual competition, no one would do business with them. It's a great example of how monopolies reduce quality and increase waste.

delecti 8y ago

Maybe I'm just too much of an idealist, but I don't understand a perception of the government that isn't in the first category. It's my money and I'm reaping the benefit, both through direct benefits and through the overall improvement of society. And I realize that it's partly that not everyone in government shares that sentiment, which is probably where a big part of the problem comes in, but that's another thing I don't understand. How can people not care so much?

danzig13 8y ago

Having worked as an actual Fed, I think there is a bit more complication to this. I know that I and the people around me worked hard to do a good job on our project. I would hire any of those people. I also saw a great deal of the government is run by MVPs built by Feds on their own initiative. On the other hand, the projects (including ours) I saw to replace those MVPs were largely staffed by incompetent or unfocused contractors, and I believe that is where a huge amount of waste comes in. These contractors are once removed from even government and the waste results from this Milton Friedman push for privatization of government functions to organizations just trying to log billable hours.

simonsarris 8y ago

Someone wondered publicly how the economics of Starbuck's recently-announced coffee delivery service are going to work. They don't think it will. But it's probably going to be very easy easy. Police or Fire or other public departments order the coffee every day which gets buried as an office expense and taxpayers foot the bill. The bureaucracies are happy. Starbucks is happy. No one else, uh, notices.

jondubois 8y ago

It's not true because when you spend somebody else's money on a third party, that third party can pay you back with future favors so there is a huge long term career incentive for you to give out a lot.

OzzyB 8y ago

“Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest... The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms: greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.” -Gordon Gekko

HillaryBriss 8y ago

> ... if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. what about when you're spending your parents' money on a cell phone for them?