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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Woah, I'm not from America, but that seems really wrong. More taxes and bigger government does not create any sort of extra benefit for the poor - the extra taxes will simply go to creating more levels of indirection and inflated prices in existing government.

Why do you think anything with a government stamp is automatically 10x the price? It's not because of people wanting smaller government. Smaller government is about localizing procurement down to the smallest workable level.

Making a huge tender to build these environmentally safe houses for everyone would mean only the biggest and most expensive companies could compete in the 10 year long bidding process. Making a tender for 10 houses for the local poor in your village would be free in comparison, and those 10 houses would be ready before the poor die of old age.

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> Why do you think anything with a government stamp is automatically 10x the price?

In general, yes. But not in the best run governments---Singapore comes to mind.

(But even Europe isn't quite as bad as the US. American public procurement---especially for infrastructure projects---is truly hideous and expensive by global standards.)

The Swiss seem a good model if you are looking for how localized government can work.

>But even Europe isn't quite as bad as the US. American public procurement---especially for infrastructure projects---is truly hideous and expensive by global standards.

I don't understand why that is. We paid ten billion dollars to replace the SF Bay Bridge, and it took forever. Now we're going to spend seventy billion for a train that goes from nowhere to nowhere, and very little is actually going toward construction itself.

Is it the cumulative effect of regulations, or the price of labor, or corruption? Something else?

Labour is expensive in American, but not 10x more than in Europe. You also got corruption, but you got that in Europe, too. Especially southern Europe---but Spain is still not a bad as the US at building public infrastructure.

There's some special American factors. One is that your population, and by extension the lawmakers they vote for, don't trust the bureaucrats at all, and thus make try to micromanage the public servants with laws that remove discretion. These laws are intended to remove opportunities for corruption, but they also remove opportunities for common sense.

For example, in most of the US they have to award public contracts to the lowest bidder---no matter how likely the awarders think the lowest bidder is going to overrun schedule and budget.

I've read a bit about these problems (and my summary above is from memory). Even lurking on HN, this topic comes up from time to time in the comments.

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