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Comment by schmidtleonard | Hacker News Reader

When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly?

On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing?

When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention?

When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords?

And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."

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Unless you agree with the US's current budget (and the staggering debt it entails), you can't say that the government is particularly efficient.

What a bizarre argument. Where is the implication even coming from that gets you to the idea they can't think government services can be better for the people than private products unless you "agree with the US's current budget". Why would the current us budget, good or bad, efficiently spent or not, deeply corrupt or perfectly honest, be the only criteria for having an opinion on shared services versus private market?

Are you trying to say that you think the current US budget is bad and therefore all government spending for all time is inherently bad and worse than every other option? If so that's a really weak take.

It depends. The military is not particularly efficient, but it's not clear whether that is desirable. The tax system is not efficient, but that is by design of the industry. Many other organizations are surprisingly efficient actually, hence why some of DOGE's scalpel treatment was so harmful.

The government is an enormous ship and you want enough checks and balances to ensure it cannot suddenly turn on a dime without a huge emergency.

As for the debt, that mostly comes down to:

1) Military spending to enforce US domination across the globe.

2) Social security for the Boomers (many countries are being hit by this).

3) Unsustainably low tax rates given the requirements of government. In particular, the presence of numerous tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy.

4) The insanity of the healthcare industry in the US.

The meaning of the word "efficiency" is highly contextual.

Operation Warp Speed rapidly developed and distributed a totally novel COVID vaccine to billions of people in just two years, but was extremely costly. Was that efficient?

The number of federal employees per American citizen has been shrinking for 80 years. Is that efficient, if it also leads to long waits for government visits?

The United States has not fought a peer state in war for decades - largely because billions of dollars are spent to build bombs that will spend their entire lives in a warehouse. Is that efficient?

Large organizations tend to operate the same way regardless of their ideology. The only real difference between government and private orgs is that one of them will fail faster under stress - and much like efficiency, whether that's good or bad depends on context.

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