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Comment by digitaltrees | Hacker News Reader

A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success. The conservative opposition with shrinking government and making it ineffective is profound error that will make it harder to start and grow businesses, invest in innovation and compete on the world stage. We should be working to have the best government in the world not the smallest.

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This is one thing that has always confounded me about conservatives. America is really number one in a lot of ways. The awful terrible bloated government they complain about has fostered the best university system in the world, the best companies in the world, massive wealth, an invincible military, a dominant position on the world stage, the world's reserve currency... and they want to throw a wrench in the machine that produced those results? Is #1 economy not good enough??

This is why the voluntary weakening of America's position in NATO is so wild. The US has so much power over Europe and the whole world through this. Everyone will (for better or worse) do whatever we want. And they even spend tons of money at US defense companies. Just look at Rheinmetall's stock price to see what the market thinks of this. Germany, UK, and France will all re-militarize without the US.

If Trump sets in motion a series of events that cause the world to switch to a different reserve currency, a lot of Americans are going to realize how good we had it. American hegemony may not be great for the world, but it sure is great for Americans.

There's a meme going around of Xi Jinping just sitting back and letting Trump dismantle the US himself. Except that it's not a joke, it's reality.

> There's a meme going around of Xi Jinping just sitting back and letting Trump dismantle the US himself. Except that it's not a joke, it's reality.

I wonder if the liberals had it wrong: that Trump isn’t beholden to Russia, but to China instead. The goal s to destroy America’s credibility by bullying our allies even more than our supposed non-allies. He wanted to tariff Mexico and Canada at 25% but China only 10%. I see the end of his term with China replacing the USA as the premiere super power, they already are rapidly catching up with key investments in green energy, Eavs, AI, automation, drones, etc…they have things the world wants to buy while we have…bluster, bullying, and nothing else really appealing (buy our manufacturing output that costs 2X and is half as good!).

25% or 10% additional tarrifs. Not sure what the current tarrifs for China or Canada are.

Paul manafort got an excel file with voter data from someone he knew to be a Russian operative. Trump publicly asked for Russia to hack his opponent, now we are negotiating directly with Russia and only Russia to end a war it started and splitting the spoils by getting rare earth minerals from Ukraine. Thats a consistent thread if I ever saw one.

Absolutely. The idea that increased European defence spending will be with US defence companies is for the birds.

Europeans now know that the military spending (and the factories) need to be on the correct side of the Atlantic, and not vulnerable to the whims of an unreliable ally

Exactly this and unfortunately it’s too late. No one will trust America after this. The global order will unravel and everyone will pull into their own self reliance.

But some trans women are playing sports!

I’m only half-joking. It really does come down to “cultural issues” for much of Trump’s base, many of whom don’t have the education or curiosity to understand what they want to destroy.

The same people who spent highschool snorting mints and failing biology want to tell me how biology works and that they totally understand the immune system.

The annoying thing is that preventing males from intruding upon the female category in sport would've been a perfectly fine left-wing policy from a feminist perspective.

It's so ridiculous that it took Trump of all people to address this and similar such lunacy that's even more harmful, like locking up males in women's prisons.

Democrats should've dropped this trans nonsense years ago when it started becoming obvious how policy based around "gender identity" adversely affects women and girls.

Instead they pushed and pushed to the point of absurdity, making an absolute mockery of their political platform. It's such idiocy.

I wouldn't say highly competent. Even at its best the US has such a tribalistic view of politics that has held back so many improvements

This isn’t remotely true. Have you been to a country that doesn’t have a competent bureaucracy? There are no roads, no economic data for business to plan. The list goes on and on. The sheer volume of goods and services we each rely on and benefit from working flawlessly in the background without ever realizing is staggering when you stop to think about it. Go travel to a country that doesn’t have the cdc, the federal reserve etc, and tell me how easy it is to do business and build a life.

> A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success.

I doubt this. Do you really think the government is the reason Silicon Valley has been so successful? Sure the government created the internet, but after that many tech companies flourished in Silicon Valley with very little regulation. I think that's why America has been so successful. If you look at anything the government gets its hands in, costs sky rocket (education, healthcare, etc).

Many of those SV success stories received funding from VC firms and eventually IPO'ed, systems that are SEC-regulated.

Not to mention NSF, DARPA, and other grants from federal agencies. That’s how we got Google.

The whole point is a highly competent government is one the does have an appropriate level of regulation. Regulation like disallowing non-competes. I think that there is plenty of good evidence that the whole reason Silicon Valley is in California is their long (and historically unusual stance among US states) history of disallowing non-competes.

This is why all this DOGE shit is so frustrating to a lot of people. I don't disagree that there is government waste, or that there are regulations that should be scrapped. But people don't realize how much success in this country is due to having largely fair and functioning institutions. That's all getting chucked out the window now.

SV has very deep military origins... Steve Blank has some great posts on this... and modern SV has been the beneficiary of a ton of Superfund money to keep big areas livable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...

Yes, why is it called Silicon Valley? Are you aware it’s because the federal government set up a nasa program in the Bay Area that concentrated engineering talent and kick started the first set of companies? Are you aware government contracts provided much of the initial demand that got those companies revenue? Are you aware of the massive public investment to establish the internet? Or the GPS network? I could go on and on. The government pays for the basic research and infrastructure that isn’t commercially viable, companies then take up the mantle of commercialization from a significantly derisked reality.

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