8 ms·
Can you give me one example of government wealth creation?
by albertop 3y ago
Can you give me one example of government wealth creation?
- FollowingTheDao 3y agoWhy do people always forget the government is made up of people and people create things.
- tjrgergw 3y agoHere come the Free Market Fundamentalists... I don't know, roads?
- eru 3y agoCompare https://fee.org/articles/russian-smugglers-renovate-road-neglected-by-the-government/ https://fee.org/articles/russian-smugglers-renovate-road-neg...
- tjrgergw 3y agoAh yes, I want my roads built by smugglers. You people would rather die than commit heresy against the Church of Free Market.
- eru 3y agoBuilding private roads is (almost) illegal in most of the world, so you'll mostly see criminals do it. See also https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-1993/private-toll-roads-in-america-the-first-time-around/ https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-1993/private-toll-road... Financing roads from tolls is fairly straightforward.
- bentcorner 3y agoClearly the American government is failing at providing enough opportunity for smugglers.
- eru 3y agoYou mean the Russian government?
- ncallaway 3y agoSure. The public highway systems.
- dkqmduems 3y agoBacking the dollar?
- andsoitis 3y ago> Can you give me one example of government wealth creation? I think that's the wrong question, and a loaded one at that. It is probably more objective to think about government's role in providing a stable foundation for the private sector to produce wealth. There are countless examples of that, such as a reliable and just regulatory framework within which to operate, negotating treaties for international trade, creating infrastructure that lead to incredible wealth creation (think the internet), to name just a tiny few.
- tekla 3y agoDoes a majority of the IC industry and the internet count?
- eru 3y agoIf we wanted to do this properly, we would have to look at opportunity costs, and see what that money / resources could have done otherwise. To give a related example: war often leads to innovation. In our current universe, the second world war lead to digital computers. However, IBM (and others) were already hard at work improving their computing devices and would have landed at electronic, digital computers sooner or later, too. Without spending something like ~50% of world GDP nor killings tens of millions of people. For another really egregious example: have a look at manned space exploration. Specifically the International Space Station. Google said its total costs were about 150 billion USD. Compare '20 Breakthroughs from 20 Years of Science aboard the International Space Station' https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/iss-20-years-20-breakthroughs https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/iss... That least is pretty meagre. They even have to cite spending money by itself as a 'breakthrough'. Almost all of their 'breakthroughs' could have been done for cheaper with unmanned space flight (and most of them are useless and irrelevant anyway.) They could have left those 150 billion USD with the taxpayer, and private industry would have surely used them better.
- albertop 3y agoSpace X is proving without any doubt that the space exploration can be done significantly cheaper by private company.
- eru 3y agoYes. I didn't bring them up, because most of their customer base is still governments, and that would have muddied the argument. (I think that (most of) space exploration should be left completely to the private sector, not just the execution, but also the financing. Even if you think that the government should be involved in the sciences, manned space flight is pretty much a more expensive version of unmanned space flight. It's useful as entertainment only, so far. Eg the moon landing was great entertainment, better than a Marvel movie. But also more expensive. I don't think the government should be involved in providing entertainment. But in any case, after the moon landing, the amount of inspiration coming out of manned space flight has dropped dramatically.)
- devoutsalsa 3y agoCivilization.
- brvsft 3y agoAt best, government and civilization is a chicken-and-egg relationship, where you could perhaps argue that anywhere civilization occurs, a government does as well. I doubt that's even provably true anyway. But the idea that a government first forms and then bestows upon us the gift of civilization would be incorrect. I suppose you're being flippant since you didn't bother to justify that comment.
- andsoitis 3y ago> that anywhere civilization occurs, a government does as well This is because beyond a certain amount of complexity (e.g. on the path to civilization), you better have a government what orchestrates favorable outcomes. One way to frame it might be a chicken/egg problem, as you say, but that just begs the question whether one can meaningfully exist without the other?
- altcognito 3y agoAll right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what has the Rom-- government ever done for us?
- cercatrova 3y agoMany of those are private or quasigovernmental entities, to be fair.
- albertop 3y agoAnd whenever gov allows private entities the service is better and cheaper.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoNukes to prevent future world wars.
- supertrope 3y agoThe next one will be really devastating and maybe triggered by accident.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoAccidents will cause less damage than intentional use of many.
- wing-_-nuts 3y agoThere's almost no use of nuclear weapons against two nuclear armed countries that doesn't walk up the tit for tat escalation ladder. Perun did a video about this a while back and it's pretty terrifying.