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Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed

Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed to advocate for smaller government and minimal access to any data except for that required to perform government's mandates according to the various governmental agency charters. The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors. My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.

terminalshort 1y ago
[flagged]
- plussed_reader 1y ago
  [flagged]
- schmidtleonard 1y ago
  When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly? On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing? When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention? When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords? And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
  - deburo 1y ago
    Unless you agree with the US's current budget (and the staggering debt it entails), you can't say that the government is particularly efficient.
    - collingreen 1y ago
      What a bizarre argument. Where is the implication even coming from that gets you to the idea they can't think government services can be better for the people than private products unless you "agree with the US's current budget". Why would the current us budget, good or bad, efficiently spent or not, deeply corrupt or perfectly honest, be the only criteria for having an opinion on shared services versus private market? Are you trying to say that you think the current US budget is bad and therefore all government spending for all time is inherently bad and worse than every other option? If so that's a really weak take.
    - hodgehog11 1y ago
      It depends. The military is not particularly efficient, but it's not clear whether that is desirable. The tax system is not efficient, but that is by design of the industry. Many other organizations are surprisingly efficient actually, hence why some of DOGE's scalpel treatment was so harmful. The government is an enormous ship and you want enough checks and balances to ensure it cannot suddenly turn on a dime without a huge emergency. As for the debt, that mostly comes down to: 1) Military spending to enforce US domination across the globe. 2) Social security for the Boomers (many countries are being hit by this). 3) Unsustainably low tax rates given the requirements of government. In particular, the presence of numerous tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy. 4) The insanity of the healthcare industry in the US.
    - SR2Z 1y ago
      The meaning of the word "efficiency" is highly contextual. Operation Warp Speed rapidly developed and distributed a totally novel COVID vaccine to billions of people in just two years, but was extremely costly. Was that efficient? The number of federal employees per American citizen has been shrinking for 80 years. Is that efficient, if it also leads to long waits for government visits? The United States has not fought a peer state in war for decades - largely because billions of dollars are spent to build bombs that will spend their entire lives in a warehouse. Is that efficient? Large organizations tend to operate the same way regardless of their ideology. The only real difference between government and private orgs is that one of them will fail faster under stress - and much like efficiency, whether that's good or bad depends on context.
hodgehog11 1y ago
> to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think. In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that. > to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.
- schmidtleonard 1y ago
  > that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener. Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich." The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
  - hodgehog11 1y ago
    But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either and like everything it must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Enshittification is inevitable, but would be easily undone if the anti-trust laws were properly enforced. It's a beautiful balancing act, and we can't get there by black-and-white "government bad/good, private bad/good". At least, that's what I think. It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.
crims0n 1y ago
> contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.

terminalshort 1y ago

[flagged]

plussed_reader 1y ago
[flagged]
schmidtleonard 1y ago
When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly? On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing? When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention? When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords? And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
- deburo 1y ago
  Unless you agree with the US's current budget (and the staggering debt it entails), you can't say that the government is particularly efficient.
  - collingreen 1y ago
    What a bizarre argument. Where is the implication even coming from that gets you to the idea they can't think government services can be better for the people than private products unless you "agree with the US's current budget". Why would the current us budget, good or bad, efficiently spent or not, deeply corrupt or perfectly honest, be the only criteria for having an opinion on shared services versus private market? Are you trying to say that you think the current US budget is bad and therefore all government spending for all time is inherently bad and worse than every other option? If so that's a really weak take.
  - hodgehog11 1y ago
    It depends. The military is not particularly efficient, but it's not clear whether that is desirable. The tax system is not efficient, but that is by design of the industry. Many other organizations are surprisingly efficient actually, hence why some of DOGE's scalpel treatment was so harmful. The government is an enormous ship and you want enough checks and balances to ensure it cannot suddenly turn on a dime without a huge emergency. As for the debt, that mostly comes down to: 1) Military spending to enforce US domination across the globe. 2) Social security for the Boomers (many countries are being hit by this). 3) Unsustainably low tax rates given the requirements of government. In particular, the presence of numerous tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy. 4) The insanity of the healthcare industry in the US.
  - SR2Z 1y ago
    The meaning of the word "efficiency" is highly contextual. Operation Warp Speed rapidly developed and distributed a totally novel COVID vaccine to billions of people in just two years, but was extremely costly. Was that efficient? The number of federal employees per American citizen has been shrinking for 80 years. Is that efficient, if it also leads to long waits for government visits? The United States has not fought a peer state in war for decades - largely because billions of dollars are spent to build bombs that will spend their entire lives in a warehouse. Is that efficient? Large organizations tend to operate the same way regardless of their ideology. The only real difference between government and private orgs is that one of them will fail faster under stress - and much like efficiency, whether that's good or bad depends on context.

hodgehog11 1y ago

> to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think. In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that. > to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.

schmidtleonard 1y ago
> that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener. Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich." The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
- hodgehog11 1y ago
  But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either and like everything it must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Enshittification is inevitable, but would be easily undone if the anti-trust laws were properly enforced. It's a beautiful balancing act, and we can't get there by black-and-white "government bad/good, private bad/good". At least, that's what I think. It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.

crims0n 1y ago

> contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.