Record Numbers of Americans Want to Leave the U.S

I agree that 40% of such a large population will not emigrate, yes. But the article is saying that 40% want to leave, not that 40% will leave. Migration is complicated, expensive, and painful. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect a significant gap between interest and follow through in this area.

There is however some historical precedent here. When east and west Germany united, about 10% of the population moved from east to west, most women in the 18-29 bracket. The result is that by 2012 east Germany now has 89 women per 100 men (80/100 in rural areas), a significant statistical gap.

While the causes of the above were different, I’d be pretty comfortable saying that the culture shock between east/west Germany was equal to or less than the culture shock between the US and English speaking Canada. So I wouldn’t find a young female migration in the 8-10% range surprising, although I would find it deeply alarming.

The common examples are invisible because nobody talks about things that are working. For example, ever have to buy a box of screws, or a hammer, or a piece of rope? Sold in any hardware store at low, transparent prices with minimal regulation and good quality.

> Instead, whenever govt reduces regulation too far, companies form monopolies, perform deceptive trade practices, and break the fundamental concepts of capitalism.

This is the trap of ideological purism. You can argue about "less regulation is better" or "more regulation is better" as an abstract principle but that's not a way to evaluate an individual regulation. Applying either principle blindly and universally would require either total anarchy or total authoritarianism, which isn't what anybody actually wants.

It's possible to eliminate necessary regulations while still having too many (or the wrong) other regulations -- this is in fact what commonly happens in Washington, because the people who win there are the people with the best lobbyists, whether they want to pass/preserve bad competition-destroying regulations or eliminate good competition-protecting ones.

The advantage of a general principle of less regulation, especially at the national level in an environment known to be wasteful and corrupt, is that you can find alternatives for the national government not doing something -- whether it's markets or citizen organizations or local government. But if they waste your resources on corruption and bureaucracy, you can't recover them to use for something better, which interferes with anybody doing something better.

> All of which is irrelevant (again) to this article, which is stating that people are unhappy with the results. They aren't demanding tax cuts, they want the results.

You keep saying this, but the article doesn't say that at all. It says that people are dissatisfied, not why. And given the demographics of the most dissatisfied groups, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising to learn that they would e.g. prefer to reduce military spending.

And if you do want the results, wasting tax money still interferes with that.

For example, you mention homelessness, but that is inherently a local issue. There is a major homelessness problem in San Francisco but not so much in Kansas. And you also can't solve it in SF by building shelters in Kansas. You can't even solve it in SF by building shelters in Bakersfield. The relationship it has with inefficient military spending is that they come from the same tax base -- if the people of San Francisco are paying taxes to fund the military, those dollars can't be used (by the local government or the people themselves) to address homelessness there. Resources are scarce. When the government wastes them, you no longer have them.

> The primary obstacle to results in recent decades has not been the govt being bad at it's job, but people demanding the govt stop doing these things and cutting their funding to do so, then complaining about the govt's inability to fix things.

Only the federal budget hasn't declined. It has been ~20% of GDP since the end of WWII and still is. Which means it has been growing over time, since real GDP per capita is up. If they're providing worse or fewer services than they used to, it's because they're doing less with more, not because they have less in total.

> These are the same people demanding bigger military funding and focus on oil, so the govt seems to be doing a decent job of doing what it's asked...it's just not what I and many others are asking for.

That is the corruption and inefficiency. The people asking for that are defense contractors and oil companies and their workers, who have tons of (taxpayer-sourced) money to lobby with are not a small voting block because the scope of the expenditures is so massive that it employs a large number of people. It's exactly the sort of thing we could reduce in order to lower taxes without impacting the level of actual services provided.