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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Do you think the complaints about government come unfairly out of the blue while it busily provides efficient and timely service with a friendly smile to its constituents?

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No. However, consider that since the 40's there has been a concerted effort by a variety of actors, such as Rothbard and other people backed by institutes such as the Volker fund, the AEI, Federalist Society, Murdochs, etc. to sap both the perceived effectiveness of government and the actual effectiveness of government.

"Government doesn't work - elect me and I'll prove it!"

No criticism of the ineffectiveness of government is complete until we've blamed Rothbard.

Well hey, he's the only person I know of to have argued professionally that a government shouldn't even be powerful enough to prevent people from selling their children on the open market to the highest bidder. He's kind of the most extreme example one can pluck, and quite an influential one, at that.

Isn't that an argument against Rothbard being successful? You can't meaningfully auction off a child in the US. Although I guess some may argue he's been successful to the extent that in some parts of the US you can electively terminate your unborn offspring, which is a firmly Rothbardian viewpoint.

If my goal is murder, but I only render you completely brain dead, or maybe only paralyzed from the neck down, have I failed? Yeah, in some sense. But in terms of the grievous harm rendered, I've succeeded to a pretty serious degree.

Based on your recommendation of the "pretty serious degree" to the extent Rothbard has managed to decrease government, I have decided to donate a token amount to the Mises Institute in your honor [0]. I gotta say until now I thought he was just a fringe actor with minimal influence and perhaps at most 1 or 2% of representatives even know who he was.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/yu05Gde.png

I guess the better question is, are the complaints limited to those that provide a poor service? Or are they fairly evenly distributed regardless of how good or bad the government in question performs?

I think there's a self-reinforcing downward spiral where reduced funding and poore reputation begets poorer service and vice versa.

It could be that the two things -- complaints and actual service delivered -- are unrelated.

Meanwhile in the the real world complaints about service and the quality of said service do tend to correlate.

And sometimes it's intentional: Take the DMV in Texas.

Texas specifically shut down DMV offices in some of the most populated areas. Yeah, that's going to make the DMV suck in those areas. Of course, they left open then ones in the more rural areas, and those DMVs are going to be quite pleasant.

was that to make it harder to register to vote?

The point isn't the government services are currently high quality. The point is that the current environment foster low quality service. In some cases voting in politicians that drove top-down management changes would help. And that would require the populace to value such changes. We might need to structure the incentives for government employees, contractors, or the regulatory environment to better align with delivering good service. That might mean more pay, which means either higher taxes or strong prioritization of efforts. We can't do that intelligently if nobody cares, or is skilled enough to drive these large institutions. Because it is hard. We almost certainly are using the wrong tradeoffs: some things privatized and outsourced should be done by government agencies. Some functions should be privatized or just regulated on the open market. Some things are better handled at regional levels that today are handled at local or national levels. The mix of tradeoffs is wrong. Incremental work to fix this requires a society-wide agreement to make progress. Not necessarily agreement on any particular (and even when there is agreement, we are going to get it wrong a bunch) but agreement on the project of bettering our society and social collaboration. That seems like it is missing and thus progress is made only in fits in starts, in a hostile environment. A hard-one deregulation here, a new bill to fund a project there, contested on ll sides, and undermined before the initiatives get started.

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