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Why Governments Fail

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Re: Why Governments Fail

#71

Post by MomoXenosaga »

jonathannat wrote: post #11
giantg2 wrote: post #4

There's a lot in here. I was going to make some quotes and comment about some of this, but it's a pretty diverse set of topics. The main thing is that I didn't see a solid definition on how a failing government is defined or a concrete connection between that and the topics covered. It seems to be Q&A about a bunch of loosely affiliated topics.

The discussion is a bit all over the place. The main points are that EU failed vaccination, and US failed covid testing (Statista disagrees https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104645/covid19-testing-... ) , as well as having a decline of innovation and movement (disagrees here, people moved everywhere during covid, and US came up with tons of effective vaccines) It's pretty hilarious both ignored discussing the curr…

People have been predicting China's government to fail since 1948. If Mao couldn't do it with his disastrous communist nonsense it's going to take a lot. The CCP has cleverly pivoted to Chinese nationalism (the wolf warrior diplomacy is for internal consumption).

I think it would be best to have a backup plan for what happens if China doesn't implode.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#72

Post by slibhb »

mcculley wrote: post #70
slibhb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing nothing is a perfectly fine policy. In medicine they say "first, do no harm".

This is the most contrived apology for incompetence that I have read. I am quite amazed. It would be different if we had never before experienced a pandemic. It would be different if we did not have the examples of countries and cultures with effective implementation of testing at scale while we did nothing. This defense of inaction is like leaving potholes alone because doing the obvious thing might cause harm someh…

I'm arguing for a distinction between being wrong and failure. I don't see anything from you (or the other poster) besides rhetoric. Apparently we should have "just known" that this virus was going to be a disaster. And evidence of this was "I knew" or "other countries knew". Great, and half of HN "knows" there is imminent hyperinflation.

It may be fair to describe the lack of available tests a failure. All the PCR testing sites near me were 100% booked whenever I checked and the state did nothing (as far as I know) to tell us where we could get tested. Perhaps that could be described as a failure. But the rhetoric from you and the other poster is post-hoc silliness. Neither of you seem to be aware that you're expecting the government to tell the future or what the drawbacks of that might be.

For a taste, consider that citizens blaming the government for 9/11 plausibly led to a years-long illegal wire-tapping and at least one clearly unnecessary war.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#73

Post by giantg2 »

watwut wrote: post #45
paulpauper wrote: post #38

If otherwise young, healthy ppl were dropping dead in droves because of this, then I think there would have been more more mobilization, cooperation, and compliance, but the later data showed Covid only being slightly more deadly than the flu for young and middle-aged people instead of 40x as deadly as originally feared.So the urgency and concern began to dissipate by mid-2020 when the studies came about affirming a…

> Covid only being slightly more deadly than the flu for young and middle-aged people That is not true. Flu is significantly less deadly for the same age bracket. You have to compare young healthy people dying from flu with young heathy people dying from covid.

Do you have the numbers? I would specifically be interested in the 09 swine flu, which is one of the strains which affected younger people more than normal.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#74

Post by oddmiral »

lbriner wrote: post #6
oddmiral wrote: post #3

Every organisation has 3 major stages: newborn, mature, and old. When competition is present, old organizations are eaten by newborn organizations. Government is monopoly, so no competition, thus old organization must die first.

Are you saying that we should have competitive governments? Interesting idea! Unfortauntely, I think the states are too high at government level. Nothing too bad will happen when one trash company takes over from another trash company but what would happen if some random group took over the defence policy for a country because the current government didn't seem to be doing very well at it?

Some form of competition is nice to have. For example, it's better to have a parliament than a dictator, because parties will compete with each other to fit people needs (or oligarch needs, if democracy is broken).

In Canada, police forces are compete. For example, municipality can sign contract with one of provincial police force or municipal police force, or create their own police force. This competition creates a positive feeback loop.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#75

Post by 8note »

slibhb wrote: post #36
mcculley wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not demand that the government successfully predict the future. In March 2020, it was obvious what was happening in other countries. We were informed by the past and the present to determine how to respond.

> While this would have cost a lot of money, it would have been less than the PPP and stimulus efforts. This quote is demanding that the government has access to future numbers, isn't it? I don't agree that it was obvious what was happening in March. It's only obvious in retrospect.

It was obvious to the government what was happening.

They got rich off it

Re: Why Governments Fail

#76

Post by billytetrud »

paulpauper wrote: post #50

>. I'm just saying the observed increase in wealth inequality in these nations goes away when you abstract from land. So capital is not the problem. Let's deregulate building. Yeah cuz the fortune 500 list is dominated by land-owners such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. Wealth inequality arises from capital concentration, of which land is just one of several forms of concentration. But the ability of large, power…

> Wealth inequality arises from capital concentration

No. Wealth inequality is capital concentration. What you're saying is that rain causes rain. In actuality what causes wealth inequality is corruption. The financial sector has been extracting wealth from the people since the 70s. That's what causes wealth inequality.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#77

Post by loki49152 »

varispeed wrote: post #14

The problem is that nobody cares about corruption, or the so-called "lobbying". Big companies get their way at the expense of regular citizens meanwhile police and other agencies are busy enforcing big pharma monopoly on drugs. Most governments run until they are exposed and people are mad enough to march on the streets, or they simply run out of "their" monopoly money. To improve that we need a ruthless agency that…

Lobbying is a form of self-defense against the real corruption - a government that has assigned itself the power to interfere in our day-to-day lives. Most people today take it for granted that "regulations" must exist because they solve some actual problem.

Usually, the "problem" they exist to solve is that some government functionary wants to look like they're "doing something", which is itself a form of corruption. Regulations also commonly serve ideologically-motivated belief that some faction has managed to force on everyone else. Everything else that is "corrupt" about proscriptive regulations follows from the fact that the belief in proscriptive regulations is a corrupt belief (and illegal under the US Constitution as it was actually written).

Re: Why Governments Fail

#78

Post by gen220 »

dane-pgp wrote: post #65
gen220 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what federalism is! (Competing state and local governments, federated together and governed by a centralized federal government, which grows over time as citizens of the states agree on what laws they want to enforce). Most laws passed by the federal government were first experimented with at the local or state level, until a majority of the peoples’ representatives believed they should be applied universally…

I can't help but wonder how the American political system would look if an amendment passed which gave the individual states the ability to decide for themselves: 1. What constitutes a well regulated militia 2. Whether certain drugs should be legal to consume 3. At what stage of development human life begins Moreover, I can't help wondering how popular such an amendment would be with voters, and with the two main par…

This was tried with Slavery, it was very popular with the two political parties, and it led to a civil war, whose conclusion was: no, states do not get to decide on slavery, and additionally they do not get to secede if they disagree with the federal government.

That being said, I don’t think any of these three particular things would become the underpinning of a society or an economy, to the extent that slavery was in the antebellum South. So, there probably wouldn’t be another Civil War fought over it.

I think the 2nd amendment one is the most interesting one to me, since our interpretation of it has become so distorted with the passage of time, and since we don’t seem to be converging over time on a consensus (unlike the other two, which were basically contrived for political purposes in the last generation). It’s almost impossible to imagine what the founding fathers would think about its application today.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#79

Post by haecceity »

varispeed wrote: post #14

The problem is that nobody cares about corruption, or the so-called "lobbying". Big companies get their way at the expense of regular citizens meanwhile police and other agencies are busy enforcing big pharma monopoly on drugs. Most governments run until they are exposed and people are mad enough to march on the streets, or they simply run out of "their" monopoly money. To improve that we need a ruthless agency that…

It's not a problem! Maybe it is a problem but China is even more corrupt!! They're gonna fall apart any day now! We don't have to be worry about ourselves look at China!!!

Re: Why Governments Fail

#80

Post by simonh »

loki49152 wrote: post #77
varispeed wrote: post #14

The problem is that nobody cares about corruption, or the so-called "lobbying". Big companies get their way at the expense of regular citizens meanwhile police and other agencies are busy enforcing big pharma monopoly on drugs. Most governments run until they are exposed and people are mad enough to march on the streets, or they simply run out of "their" monopoly money. To improve that we need a ruthless agency that…

Lobbying is a form of self-defense against the real corruption - a government that has assigned itself the power to interfere in our day-to-day lives. Most people today take it for granted that "regulations" must exist because they solve some actual problem. Usually, the "problem" they exist to solve is that some government functionary wants to look like they're "doing something", which is itself a form of corruption…

Just for clarity, it seems that when you say regulations, you're really talking about laws.
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