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I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.

• TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  A lot of that public money somehow ends up in the private sector, usually as corporate profits. Libertarians may want to ask themselves what happens to the private sector - aerospace, energy, R&D, infrastructure, education - when public investment stops.
  • eej71 1y ago
    I am guessing that in your mind that if a private corporation bids on a contract it should only break even? Is that it? Or perhaps - for you - even better would be - the whole thing would be done by the government. There is no private corporation?
• jjj123 1y ago
  Can both things be true? I have no doubt that a nationalized healthcare system would be bureaucratic and inefficient. But I also know our current system is worse by almost every metric and stays that way due to lobbying and, yes, propaganda against alternatives like Medicare for all.
• GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  It's not as naive as you're painting it to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)
  • eej71 1y ago
    I'm sure a similar book could be written where the political stripes are all changed. Instead of Koch, we have Soros. Instead of Musk, it would be Gates. Instead of whoever owns Sinclair Media, its Carlos Slim or Lauren Powell Jobs.
    • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      And? I would welcome that. This isn't team sports where I'm rooting for my favorite billionaire. That said, this book actually exists.
      • eej71 1y ago
        I know the book exists as I'm very familiar with the kinds of claims that get repeated in threads like this. To me - these claims seem to fuel a conspiracy like mind set about why certain efforts or movements fail. "Because the billionares didn't want it to". "Or they bought the media and control the narrative". "Its all just a uniparty!". If I were to replace the word billionare with the name of the first Abrahamic religion, you and I would both see that view point as low intellect nonsense. And it would be. But somehow, sub in the word billionare and then it becomes brilliant analysis for some.
        • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
          well, you're changing from "people only complain about some billionaires" to "people complain about all billionaires and it's just a conspiracy theory" so I'm not sure what point you're trying to get across. maybe you could read the book to dispel your mistaken notion that it's just "billionaires bad", since it's stated (and successful) objective is to cover a specific group of highly-influential people that have worked on very specific projects in furtherance of a specific political/economic ideal that we're reaping the fruits of now in real time.
        • alabastervlog 1y ago
          Boiled down, all I'm really claiming is that some rich people spent a bunch of money on lobbying, largely in favor of making money better for buying influence and in favor of making it easier for the rich to get richer with some populist culture-war-stoking side-quests to drum up the necessary votes, and the effort was pretty successful. I don't think that's an out-there or "conspiracy like mind"ed take, especially given that's just... what happened.
• alabastervlog 1y ago
  That's a non sequitur, so... OK.