Why is infrastructure in quotes? Are roads, healthcare, police, fire service, etc imaginary?
The rest pays for things that are far less transparent and far more corrupt(able), not to mention blatant wealth transfers to influential interest groups.
They're spending money training on it, storing it, operating it, and organizing operations around it so that they can justify receiving and keeping it, as well as in personnel costs associated with the staff time devoted to doing the research, applications, etc., to be awarded it.
They may not be purchasing it, but its not appearing and hanging around without expenditure of department resources.
The conservative strategy works shockingly well: defund government, appoint administrators who are actvely opposed to the existence of the programs they run, then sit back and claim that government can't do anything right.
Not sure whose comment you are referring to. My comment was intended to illustrate some properties institutions built by primates with guns.
Obviously, governments (and criminal organizations) provide some valuable services to society (employment, structure, resource allocation, etc.)
The current status quo society and government provides lots of opportunity to some, and virtually no opportunity to others. "Criminality" provides a different distribution of opportunity. Drawing a firm distinction between legitimate and criminal pursuits is a profoundly conservative worldview.
And it seems you're conflating your economic system with our government; the society we have is because our government is toothless and unable to take real action, we are subject to the brutal whims of capitalism. Every time someone suggests we wield the power of our government to better our society it's decried as "socialist" and fails. So with effective government effectively banned by conservatives, we are left with ineffective government. Which gives conservatives more ammunition to ban any remaining government.
And you seem to wholly omit the consent of the governed; perhaps you reject it as a principle, and perhaps you simply don't wish to acknowledge its existence. In the first case, you should be aware your position is an extremist ideological one and shared by almost no-one outside of academic philosophy. In the second, this is a serious omission since it is the obvious counterpoint to your entire argument above.
Your criminality point is not meaningful; the initial point was about the societal effects of actions. Governments and government officials also go against their own laws all the time.
A person who believed that stuff might say people implicitly consent to the status quo when they don't fight against it. You might dislike the two-party system, but could you get 5% of the population to dash off a quick e-mail to their representative? Could you get 10% of the population to choose who to vote for with that as the deciding issue? Could you get 20% of the population to donate $2,000 to a PAC campaigning on the issue? Could you get 40% of the population to buy a rifle and fight in a revolutionary war? If you can't do any of these things, doesn't that mean people are happy with things as they are?
Personally I've always been a bit sceptical about that argument, due to the obvious status quo bias.
For society to function we need a government, and all people benefit from society functioning and therefore government and so we agree to give certain people power to make decisions and do things no private individual would ever be allowed to do. In exchange the government is responsible to the people, through elections, referendums, protests, general dissatisfaction, and generally tries to take actions which are fair and in the best interest of society and the people.
Of course sometimes the government isn't responsible enough to the people, and sometimes the government doesn't quite take actions that are fair and in the best interest of society; no system is perfect, but that's the principle upon which our government and all modern democratic governments are based. We can discuss all day whether or not it's currently working but that's not what you asked about.
You can vote out a bad government official who wields power unfairly. If it's a bad CEO, well, you can sit back and pray to Ayn Rand that our lord and savior "the market" punishes him for his choices one day though you know chances are he'll be rewarded.
In a country with advanced propaganda techniques and several extremely well-funded intelligence organizations (foreign ops and domestic secret police), consent is an interesting word.
I think the more relevant thing to measure is dissent. It's missing.
There is a constant fray on cable news on which actors make ideological pronouncements about everything from moral issues to the dresses worn by the first lady. They stay strongly in character and gather followings of people who find such content entertaining.
Then there is the serious news in which the overriding theme is the legitimacy of government institutions and the subtle bashing of other nations and foreign institutions and foreign ways of life.
Barely half of Americans vote, and nearly half pay no income tax whatsoever.
Such apathy and lack of dissent is a remarkable accomplishment. Many Americans think it doesn't matter which of the two parties they vote for, and they are right.
As it turns out of course as in every case consent is a slippery concept to grasp but the point we are getting at here is that it simply isn't that bad yet. The government is functional and generally it does what it's supposed to do. People have normal lives. Egypt had well-funded intelligence organizations and domestic secret police. The egyptians were perfectly capable of expressing the fact that they did not consent to be governed. They rioted.
People generally care about their daily lives. As long as their daily lives aren't interrupted and they can live happily and get most of the things they need they might complain about stuff but they won't REALLY refuse to be governed. But they could, of course. Americans just choose not to.
Partially that's I think a change in the American character: we are economically driven now, not driven by principles. We don't riot and kill people because of a tax. We're pretty far away from Bastille day. We care about buying a TV and getting a job to get out of debt and putting food on the table. Until those things are threatened we will consent to be governed; all of the threats are abstract and for all intents and purposes don't really exist in a tangible way for most people.
I'm not sure if it's sad or not but it's the state of things; we consent to be governed by not rioting and burning down government buildings.
In what way is healthcare woefully underfunded?
Also: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/bridges...
Healthcare is too subject to devolve in political argument for me, someone else has to put up some data on that one.