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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed to advocate for smaller government and minimal access to any data except for that required to perform government's mandates according to the various governmental agency charters.

The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors.

My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.

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> contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector

People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.

> to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector

Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think.

In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that.

> to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors

That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.

> that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement

Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.

Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."

The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.

But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either and like everything it must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Enshittification is inevitable, but would be easily undone if the anti-trust laws were properly enforced. It's a beautiful balancing act, and we can't get there by black-and-white "government bad/good, private bad/good". At least, that's what I think.

It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.

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