Comment by nobody9999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nobody9999 | Hacker News Reader

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>That requires (1) the failure to be visible and self-evidently the result of political processes and decisions (2) people to act on (1) and actually vote (3) alternate candidates that have a genuinely different plan.

>It's not that easy to ensure that all 3 happen.

That raises a couple of questions:

1. Why aren't problems visible?

Is it a failure of local government to disclose how they're spending your money? If so, why do you and your neighbors allow that? It is your money and your town after all. Especially since, even in a medium-sized city, a few hundred people who care about their quality of life can completely upend politics as usual.

2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?

Again, this seems rather odd to me. I can certainly understand (although I don't agree) that folks may think that Federal, and even some state elections don't give them any say. But local elections are a very different story.

3. Is it really true (as you seem to contend) Is it your contention that overwhelming majorities of people everywhere just don't care about the places they live, or for what purposes their tax dollars are used?

> 1. Why aren't problems visible?

Can you actually see the almost complete failure of garbage disposal and recycling in your community? You cannot, because the failure doesn't happen there (mostly), and because most of us are not interested enough to ask (or research) the questions we would need to in order to understand how badly the people tasked with taking care of this have screwed it up.

> 2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?

Right now, I live in a mostly rural county in New Mexico. Before that, I lived right on the edge of Philadelphia, 300 yards outside the city line but closer to downtown than most of the city. I've lived in lots of other places too, both in the US and Europe, even Israel. In all of those places, a local vote is vote for someone who will be extremely constrained by the status quo and the larger political entities the surround us. So sure, I could vote for someone who might take some steps to improve a particular aspect of how the county/city/town/village deals with this or that, but it will always be taking place within the context of legislative, economic, energetic and social forces that are much, much harder to change. This can make it challenging to see the virtue of local elections, and thus to care about them in a way the reflects the extent to which we do actualy care about our communities.

But then equally why would these problems be solved by private enterprise? Why would using private enterprise allow these jobs are going to be done better?

These are fundamentally unanswered questions in this thread.

We would have even less visibility than before - I got no idea how Microsoft delivers Windows or how a private hospital is tracking performance wise? But a government gives me some kind of mechanism to see this.

Government acts as an imperfect (as you have carefully detailed) intermediary between those the service provider and service recipient the citizen.

And it is only as imperfect as the system is designed, there are adjustments that can be made, slowly sure, but they can be made.

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