Governments should really get out of it's free money crap everywhere. Only people that care should be giving out money so that they can look at their investments and make sure they want to keep spending.
Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff? Pay them competitive wages. If they're corrupt, prosecute the corruption.
I feel like these discussions always devolve from "a government is doing a thing badly" → "governments always do things badly" → "governments should stop doing things". But governments are basically the only party that can act in the best interest of citizens rather than shareholders.
So, I would much prefer "a government is doing a thing badly" → "here are ways we could fix it". This should be perfectly achievable. Of course, no bureaucracy—public or private—will ever be perfectly efficient. That doesn't mean it can't be better, or produce a net good.
Also, I do think people tend to miss all the successful things governments fund, like science research.
> But governments are basically the only party that can act with the well being of citizens, as opposed to shareholders, in mind.
Founders that hasn't gone public yet and sold out are the only ones. The government has already sold out to shareholders, at least in USA.
And no its not just "hire good people", its not just "raise wages". What happens if you raise wages is that the useless people get more money, since the ones who decide who to hire are still bad at hiring, so them raising wages without hiring better people is also a form of corruption.
In the end you need to do a deep cleanse to fix it, there are no easy fixes. Root out all plants from all interest groups, everyone that has been bribed via lobbyism money etc, in the entire government...
> And no its not just "hire good people", its not just "raise wages". What happens if you raise wages is that the useless people get more money, since the ones who decide who to hire are still bad at hiring, so them raising wages without hiring better people is also a form of corruption.
Why do you think this doesn't happen outside the government?
> Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff?
We already do. They're called grants committees and similar, and have been around for decades. They're slow, bureaucratic, and self-defeating since it's so much work and so little chance of winning a grant that everyone submits massively over-valued bids in order to make it worthwhile. However they do put a lot of effort into (trying to) make sure that only legit funding allocations are made.
> Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff? Pay them competitive wages. If they're corrupt, prosecute the corruption.
The important thing about private industry is that everyone's job is dependent not just on doing their job well but also on the company doing well.
Government programs can become corrupt because they can't fail. If a private company was giving out bloated do nothing contracts to their spouses nephew, they'd go out of business.
> But governments are basically the only party that can act in the best interest of citizens rather than shareholders
The best interest of shareholders can at least be defined, because it's narrow in scope. What is in the best interests of citizens, especially in diverse countries where there is not a lot of things with overwhelmingly broad agreement?
> people tend to miss all the successful things governments fund, like science research
People also tend to miss opportunity cost in government funding (where else could that money have gone, with greater positive outcomes?) as well as alternative sources of funding (could research have been funded privately, especially with lesser tax burden?).
> government doing badly -> government always do things badly -> government should stop doing things
Well, I don't think government does ALL things badly, so this is clearly not the case. But the NGO fraud loop is now extremely well established. The thing is none of these programs existed until pretty recently. And before this time in history, we had two mostly co-existent parties in power. Now it seems like specific people will do or allow fraud all the way to the top. We also have bills like "AB 2624" that will make it harder to even find fraud. If our government is behaving this way, I find it best to cut it off from even being allowed to do it.
Go back to roads, police and safety, not funding for alphabet causes.
