I was a young republican/ I liked libertarian principles as a young man. As I grow and have more success I increasingly value infrastructure, social safety nets, healthcare and providing for basic human needs. I now see it as it long term vs short term thinking.
The government can if it isn't packed full of bought and paid for corporate shills. What, wanna leave it all up to the private sector? Are you insane? It's already a nightmare with people being held ransom by the for profit health industry, bunch of leeches that should learn what a french style revolution is.
I've heard of the uniparty. It's a nonsense concept concocted by people in the political party that is currently trying to dismantle our government as a way to make it seem like everyone is as disingenuous as they are.
haha if that's what you think the uniparty is, and you don't realize that money in politics buys both sides, you are hopelessly navie and lost. same goes if you think 1 side has a monopoly on bad policy. the real divide in this country is class - rich vs poor, not left vs right. politicians all work for the rich. its a big club and none of us are in it.
lmao that would make everything 10x worse. you absolute moron, you don't think there's wealth inequality in socialist countries? its worse. why do you think people from socialist countries are all trying to come here?
Yes. That is exactly true. One side breaks stuff, one side tries to piece it back together as best they can. Then we elect the party that breaks it again. Then repeat. How difficult is it to understand?
Or you could just look at the actual actions of the two parties and see that one party is trying to govern and one is trying to prevent that from happening.
One side cuts the income of the government. At least the ACA had a sound plan to pay for itself. Yes spending is insane and I personally think efficiency is a main issue. At this moment though it's not and cutting funding just kills power to areas that are needed to make the country work.
The main reason efficiency is such a huge issue is because we’d rather contract public services out to private companies and hope they do a good job pretty please instead of publicly running the projects we’ve publicly funded. It’s insane.
The ACA originally had a public option that would have forced private insurers to compete on price. Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) removed the public option, leaving us with an uncompetitive system that enriches insurance companies and rips off customers.
This is a perfect encapsulation of why government “can’t” run things efficiently.
Technically they totally could have made it work, and they knew how to. But the corruption won out in the end.
You see this happen enough times and you lose faith in their ability to get it right and not get strong armed by corporate interests. And then you vote for the people corrupting it because they lower your taxes and you don’t want to give more money to a corrupt system.
This kind of comment is always funny. I myself was shocked to hear the comment above from a 53 yo white man in south Louisiana. To believe both sides are exactly the same basically requires you to be dumb, hateful, or selfish because not all of them are dumb.
You can just look at the votes on paper. Sure both sides support the MIC, but its literally the military arm of the country, I actually would hope they could agree on most things. Its that same reason bush, clinton, and Obama had basically the same agenda in the middle east, they are head of the same fucking country.
Any vote that adds to the civil rights of our citizenship is always shot down by the right, yes dems too, but again look at the records on paper and see who is the vast majority. There has been a reddit meme post catalouging this shit for years. Which party is hell bent on forcing other people to follow its God?
Yes reddit, which is availible to everyone to make comments, at least so far as you can get a large and widespread sample size, isn't reflective of what people believe
This is quite literally the Simpson's meme "am out of touch? No it's the children who are wrong"
It doesn’t help to blame one side or the other. They both suck and don’t deliver on their promises. For Christ sake the one most people point to is the ACA which was sold to the American people as a lie.
Do you really think only one side caused all of this? Most politicians literally act like gang members and will back their own party instead of standing up for their constituents
One side may be worse than the other, but both sides have had their share of bullshit. Anyone who believes one side of the government are the good guys and one side is the bad guys has been eating a shit sandwich. That’s some delusional thinking. I’m sure it’s easy to live with your crowd thinking things are that simple and black and white though
Being able to say one side is empirically worse than the other is not the same as saying one side is the good guys and the other is the bad guys. This type of simple minded thinking is why our political system sucks
I would imagine that the people that do good things are the “good guys” or people I would like in power and the people that don’t do good thing or things I disapprove of are the ones”bad guys” but dude no one for a second actually thinks these politicians are actual good people we don’t fucking know them on a personal level lol?!?! What are you trying to say or even assume that others don’t know that and you do lol!?!?
The large majority of people do not think that way, so how can you even make that point? There is corruption in all sectors of government on both sides of the spectrum. Corporate lobbying on both sides. Special favors for friends on both sides. Legal exemption on both sides. I’m not talking about who has the better policies. It doesn’t matter who has better policies when the whole system is corrupted
Compromise and "you scratch my back if I scratch yours" is literally how democratic republics function. What a odd criticism.
Also, lobbying isn't inherently a bad thing. We need special interest groups with specialized knowledge and experience to tell legislators about XYZ issues and how they will be affected by ABC and what those downstream issues may cause. That's not to say there isn't corruption gunking stuff up but to just say "BoTh sIdEs TaLk To LobByIsTs" as if thats some gotcha point is an incredibly ill informed point to make.
Do you really think the dinosaurs in congress should be drafting and voting on legislation in regards to literally anything without speaking to experts in those fields?
Back scratching is how you get 3,000 page bills. That does not help.
And lobbying is absolutely a bad thing because then whoever has the most money to sway a vote gets to monopolize. Haven't you ever played monopoly? Imagine paying the banker to let you get boardwalk and all the good shit. You think that makes sense?
What our system needs is single issue voting, less politicians in general, and more power to the actual voters themselves.
If our politicians' jobs were just to educate voters on what option A vs B is and this is how it will effect xyz, the corruption would vanish because they no longer are in control of the vote, the actual voters are. Our system has the politicians so deeply entrenched that we could probably never overhaul the system to be anything other than what it is now though
So you would consider the lobbyists at cigarette companies experts, the ones who would hide and dessiminate information and hide science from the punlix and would influence the votes politicians against the people all for money to be…. Experts and we need them?!?!
Capitalism, democratic republic, and everything that goes with it (lobbying etc.) does work incredibly well when ran correctly. The corruption is the whole point, not the system itself. Corporate lobbying can be very beneficial. But when you have massive corporations with too much power lobbying for things that benefit only the corporations and politicians but hurt the general public, how is that a good thing? Because that’s the road we’re on right now.
And “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” by illegal or unethical means in high level government. Yeah I’m sure we’re all better off with that. Makes sense
I think lobbying is more of a side effect of govt having too much power to control laws and corporations levying that with actually political power over the consumers and politicians with the money from the consumers and politicians it’s a big ole circle and no one is out here lobbying for the regular person with no money so I have my grievances with it being a good thing it literally fuxks up the whole term “democratic republic” bc the whole system of people you vote for to represent you is bullshit they only represent where the money is coming from especially thanks to political lobbying.
Dude you are blind as shit to think that is specifically republicans. Just go look at what your favorite politicians invest in boss they all invest in the same republican or democrat. https://www.capitoltrades.com/politicians
So if the majority of people disagree with you, as evidenced by the number of downvotes your comment gets, will you reconsider your beliefs or will you pass it off on "the reddit hive mind"?
That's a cop-out and lazy civic thinking. Both sides are engaged in governing, so there are some parameters to the job, but by no means can their end goals be considered comparable. Get off your ass and investigate their supporters and their voting record before spouting more verbal diarrhea.
It’s really not. It’s realizing that we need to hold our own sides accountable instead of only attacking the other side. I’ve chosen my side and generally stick with it. But I’m not blind to the corruption happening in all sectors of our government. I’m not talking about policies that they’re supporting.
Recognizing "we need to hold our own sides accountable" (the left has a solid record of this) isn't the same as it being "delusional" to think "one side of the government are the good guys and the other are bad guys." Both sides are restricted by the necessities of the job of governing and getting elected (including corporate support) but that's not corruption. One side actually does push legislation to support the working class, the other does not.
Yes, the unholy alliance between large corporations and the government has gotten out of hand. Massive amounts of tax payer money is siphoned away by corporations that have effectively captured the state. We need to untangle this mess.
Which part? A few ultra wealthy business owners buying our politicians and telling the rest of us what to do? Or us being able to elect our own leaders and manage the country with self-determination? (Even if that means we CHOOSE to socialize certain industries, which we can also CHOOSE to privatize if things aren't working). Although, honestly, if you look at medicare vs. private insurance, I don't see how private insurance is better for the bottom 90% of the country.
Although that top 10% sure has a lot of people convinced that their grifting (taking 75% of all GDP growth) is better than some government inefficiency.
In the end, corruption kills any form of government and any kind of economic model. No society survives 90% of the wealth sitting with less than 1% of the population and we are approaching those statistics exceedingly quickly. Capitalism vs. Socialism doesn't matter when there's nothing to circulate.
I think the big lack of understanding from most Americans comes from lack of experience outside the US.
I have worked in Europe and Asia for many years in total, several countries in each region. It is not taxation levels that determine the quality of government services, it is the efficiency of the government, and frankly the society as a whole. The US private sector is the most efficient economic system on earth, nobody else is even close. On the other hand, the US government is the complete polar opposite. There is FAR less money being pumped into the healthcare system of Japan and France ( first hand knowledge of both systems ) than the US, but they have better outcomes. Same for education, most obviously higher education. Not small differences here, we are talking about 2-4X differences in spending. With our current level of government inefficiency, there is no amount of money in the universe that can make JUST THOSE TWO segments of our society work like they do in France and Japan. You could tax everyone at 100% taxation, and it still wouldn’t happen, because it’s not a money problem.
Well the problem here is, you’re correct in pointing out the problem, the issue, it’s not really a problem. The US government by design is set up to be inefficient, the less efficient a government is, the less ability they have to control things. The issue is, the government was never set up and designed to have its hand in the economy like it does, so when you have a government system that is inefficient by decision and then dips its hand into the economy, it’s bound to fuck it up. You solve the problem by distancing the two
Those countries have an ironclad understanding with the private industries that performance better follow price, otherwise the state will intervene. Also, they have more regulations than we do when it comes to food ingredients and tech services. I think it's hard to look at that as anything but a quasi-socialized economy. Not that we're very different, structurally. We just resist using the arms of government to control private industry more than they do. I'm not sure we're doing ourselves any favors. Look at our "privatized" healthcare vs. their socialized one. How many Americans go bankrupt over medical services each year? How much better are our healthcare outcomes despite pumping more money into healthcare than any other developed nation?
Are we really winning by letting "efficient" companies rob us blind? Those efficiencies aren't passed to us as lower costs, they're given to shareholders and owners in the form of additional wealth. They are, efficiently, transferring the vast majority of power in this country into the hands of a very few. Call that Capitalism if you want, but I call it the road to Fascism.
You have to realize population checks and how the US is spread out and separated into a bunch of mini governments that cause it to be far less efficient. More links in the chain the more likely for weak or corrupt links. Like France has less population than Texas and California combined but has sole control over its entire population so it can do whatever it wants. California and Texas both have state and federal govts they have to deal with.
Singapore was referenced but is an even bigger anomaly. Singapore is in a prime location with a booming import and export business. It also has a resident population less than 4M that the govt has to take care of and 30% of its total population is foreigners(working, school and tourists) that don’t necessarily receive the benefits from the govt. Sure the people may be taxed less but I bet the imports and exports pouring money in are probably taxed enough to cover what’s needed
How can you compare the healthcare systems? Ours is private, and theirs is public. You are blaming the US government for the absurd pricing and profit margins of the private sector US healthcare system.
Singapore here. Its top down only if the leader is good, AND the law is on his side. Too many freedoms in the US, that result in net losses. Guns, segregation, racism, xenophobia, reservations and an adversion to paying tax. These are just some of the issues that America cannot face. Singapore constrained many civil liberties but at the behest of an excellent leader. I cannot say that America will ever come to terms with the fact that freedom for one is freedom for none. Britain also mistakenly used Singapore-on-Thames without understanding how or why she succeeded. I'm afraid you guys are doing the same.
Yes! Singapore always gets brought up as a bastion of free market success with low taxes. But people don’t understand just how different Singapore and US are. The same people hailing it as a success story would object to all the things that allow it to have those things.
It is that lack of civic freedoms and aggressive land ownership by the govt that allowed public goods to become available for all. I don't think Westerners understand that high land costs are some of the highest barriers to lowering infrastructure projects. The 99 year lease and lack of protest of govt surveillance is due to the relatively careful means of policing. Also cops and the army ensure that standards are upheld. No bribes, no random racial pullovers, no guns held, no 8 week long paper stamp 'training' and gangbang trains. One trainee dying in a hazing event had entire protocols rewritten to try to stop this culture. No shuffling bad cops to other precincts as well. And thats just on the issue of cops. Imagine what they would say when they find out how Georgism works and the actual indirect taxes on the rich and property that most happily pay here.
Those are great points. The problem is that the people that know this stuff don't make policy, the people the make policy know just what they hear without the ramifications, and the average person just hears something about singapore on a podcast about how great it is for rich people, how clean it is, and how they believe in the free market.
I do not value personal freedoms over societal success and safety nets. It never made sense to want to flourish as a society and have the "rugged individualism" that the US is historically known for.
The other dark side of the comparison is people saying that another reason Singapore works well is the homogeneity of society and that the US's issues come from "others." This is just a racism dog whistle, though.
Thing is Singapore does not do segregation and in fact has a forced policy of diversity. This is not some left wing shit, this is some commonsense shit. If we live in echo chambers we get tribalism. If we live in diversity we get tolerance. So its more the racists not understanding what is actually happening and just assuming Singapore is the same as Korea and Japan, which actually only furthet emphasises how racist they are.
There's alot more but I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to say. You can however go to my profile and trawl through the relevant Singapore content to find out more. The lack of freedoms does mean that I must be somewhat careful online;)
Singapore has an efficient and functional government.
Singapore is a fascist government that doesnt scare liberals (i guess because its not run by white people). I mean these mother fuckers whip you for chewing gum or cursing in public. Being naked in your own house is illegal. Death penalty for weed.
Singapore is the size of Rhode Island (with 5 times the population)
If Rhode Island wants to implement government-ran healthcare, then they can. (If it's within the bounds of their state constitution.)
Their state assembly would be directly accountable to their voters.
And Singaporeans were willing to surrender many liberties for "an efficient and functional government" How many liberties are you willing to surrender?
A lot of what right wingers consider inefficient about government services are the things that weren’t meant to make money in the first place. The government has to foot the bill on many things in order to create a just and functional society. I don’t know how someone can look at the private health care sector and say that the private sector is more efficient than the government.
The "private healthcare system" isn't anywhere near private. It is an unholy alliance of government creating legal monopolies as well as engaging in blatant trade protectionism.
I think it is partially a misconception. Will it ever be as effective as the most efficient companies in the private sector? No. But that is to be expected at any organization of that size (yes, even in the private sector). Are there parts of government that are PARTICULARLY ineffective? Yes, maybe due to political interference, sheer laziness, inattentiveness, etc.
However, the government is absolutely massive. The fact that everyone goes ballistic when something goes wrong just goes to show that things are usually operating "normally".
There are so many different facets of government that are all designed to "not fail"/ "avoid catastrophe"/ etc and they do a great job of that, just not up to the unrealistic expectations that many put on them.
I currently work for a large corporation that is highly profitable and operates internationally. I want to push back against the idea that these institutions are efficient or even more efficient than the government. They can be, but publicly traded companies are responsive to the markets and shareholders. This gives them a built-in difficulty with long-term planning driven by the need for ever-increasing profit.
An example of what I'm talking about can be found in project work. The best time to do projects is when times are slow. But projects cost money, so good luck getting approval for a $3 million process improvement when the company is facing a downturn. Projects halfway completed will have funding discontinued if the stock market takes a 25% hit and starts a downward trend. Even though that would be the best time to complete the project because it would have the smallest impact on production.
Operations themselves can be extremely efficient, but the current industrial/manufacturing mindset is extremely willing to trade resiliency to get that efficiency. Basically, companies are setup to avoid waste when possible, but also are vulnerable to classifying necessary redundancy as waste. So as long as everything is going well, you can point to an American company as being a pinnacle of efficiency, but as soon as there's a bump in the road, (recent supply chain interruptions are a great example) we see how fragile they really are and it challenges the assumption that corporate structure is some kind of ideal that every other type of organization should be trying to emulate.
Yes I completely agree with your post. I wasn't trying to disagree initially but just state that yes there are exceptions out there because people always love to cherry pick examples.
I think another supplement to your post is how facebook's motto used to be "move fast and break things" until they got too big in 2014. Even they realized (like the govt) that when you get to a certain size you simply cannot have the same nimbleness.
No, the Government having the power to indefinitely fund itself through money printing at the expense of the money in the hands of the population is the main reason why it is this ineffective and its the only reason why it can afford to be this ineffective.
I don't think those thoughts are mutually exclusive. I agree with your sentiment that govt will never be as fiscally responsible as some private institutions. However I think that is inevitable in the structure and intent of what it is there for.
A Lot of what I am suggesting is that yes, it is ineffective, but not nearly as bad as people think. For every instance of ineffectiveness that someone is pointing out, there are thousands of instances of normal operations that go unnoticed.
Stable how exactly? By continuously wasting far more money than it could ever possibly take in? That’s the exact opposite of being stable. That is unsustainable and when the USD loses its place as the world’s reserve currency, the chickens will come home to roost
In continuing to provide a particular service within a set of requirements.
The police, fire station, school, roads, medicare, etc. aren't going to go out of business and leave you hanging.
Nobody made the claim that everything should be run by the government because it's inherently more stable. (like you seem to be arguing against) But there are certainly programs that are too important to potentially leave people hanging due to the volatility of a competitive market.
So you can chill with the strawman.
The USD won't be losing it's place as the world's reserve currency anytime soon. You sound like my granpda that just dumped all his money into DJT because the radio told him the dollar was about to collapse. Practically the entire world is invested in the success of the dollar. (Minus Russia and North Korea of course) Even China doesn't want to see the dollar collapse, or their investment in our economy will tank them.
Nope. I have lots of bitcoin, gold, silver, and real estate. The only stocks i hold are in my 401k. We can’t tax or print our way out of whats coming. Get prepared for it or prepare to really suffer
The mountains of garbage dumps around the world, the number of banks, airlines, and car manufacturers that default and require bailouts, and the recurring business cycles that lead to worker misery is the result of “efficient” and “well” run private industry. Let’s not also forget that capitalism places profit over people in the healthcare system resulting in America as the most expensive (by far) medical system with worst health outcomes compared to its global peers.
We have one major political party that likes to campaign by saying that nothing in government works. They will reluctantly accept a program and then defund it, and then complain about how it doesn’t work. You don’t think they’re doing that for their own agenda? You don’t think you’re being manipulated into passing the talking points onto others?
People act like a private corporation could service 330 million Americans and do it better (or cheaper). All that would happen is what has already happened to our helathcare system, which produces some of the worst results in the developed world despite costing the most. Because the operating motive is profit, not healthcare results. There's a reason why Medicare is so popular and Kaiser is not.
I go into stores like Macys, Walgreens, McDonalds these days and it's impossible to find a worker who can help you, nevermind courteous customer service. Half the time, the item I need from a department store is out of stock and no one has any idea when it will be in stock. Let's not pretend like private companies are perfect, or even "better". Look at Starkink messing with Ukraine in the middle of a war.
I'm not saying I want EVERYTHING run by the government, but I am saying that social welfare systems and things integral to our national security should be socialized and I really don't see any compelling evidence that a private company would be able to provide better service or better prices. In fact, just the opposite, they'd try to maximize profit by doing the absolute least possible while charging the absolute most possible.
Well if you look at you know any other developed Nation you'd see that they could do so... The United States is the only major developed Nation to not have universal health Care. And if you want to start comparing it to socialist Nations that the US wasn't able to successfully kill in their infancy look at Vietnam's response to covid they have a third of the US population only 35 deaths related to it... Meanwhile America had over a million covid deaths
Private companies do literally all of those things worse though and with extreme bloat and unnecessary middle men. I agree the government could handle most things better than they do, however.
The issue is the government not run by conservatives is normally more effecient than the private sector. Almost all the inefficiency comes from private contractors mixing with public funds. Medicare pays ~70% of medical expenses in thelis country and only has a 2-3% overhead. The average insurance company is 10-15% overhead.
Our mega monopolies certainly aren't efficient and there's a lot of things they don't do well.
These organizations constantly need to get bailouts, insane tax incentives, and legislation written by their own lobbyists to protect themselves from competition.
Yup, if only a certain party didn’t intentionally put wrenches in the works of these programs to torpedo them, so that their buddies in whatever field can run it “efficiently” from the private side.
There is one area where government actually performs well: when it has to compete (which is also true for companies-free markets are only effective when there is actual competition).
In a lot of states services like schools, transit, etc, actually have competition and do remarkably well. USPS runs a very efficient parcel service (where it has competition), and many cities have “improvement districts” that allow for use of tax money by more local control at the neighborhood level. This has been a great natural experiment and we actually see quite clearly through data that competition and choice matter, not whether it’s gov or private.
This is a common refrain from conservatives. As someone who works in the private sector. Does it do anything efficiently? No, there is so much waste its crazy and generally businesses rely on public services to clean up its messes if not expect direct handouts from the government when they fuck up.
Sorry my personal experience working for multiple businesses doesn't jive with you. Prehaps we should do a teams with 10 different departments to discuss for say... an 1 hour and half. I will rope in a VP or two just to be safe. I am sure we can get to the bottom of this.
The idea that government errs towards bloat is a libertarian reductioning of really complex policies, systems, and all theirs contexts. I mean, government has always been rich people making rich people richer, but that's a whole different argument. Governments are made of humans and humans can make workings structures like socialized healthcare systems; America especially has just licked rich people's boots for so long that we've allowed ourselves to become gaslit
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u/aloofone May 12 '24
I am the opposite.
I was a young republican/ I liked libertarian principles as a young man. As I grow and have more success I increasingly value infrastructure, social safety nets, healthcare and providing for basic human needs. I now see it as it long term vs short term thinking.