[toomuchtodo]

In a game of telephone sort of way. The will of the people appears to get mangled severely on the way to government leadership.

Norway's government cut off 50% of its population from public broadcasts with this change. And their electorate is okay with that? I find that hard to believe but perhaps their electorate finds that acceptable for the cost savings.

[ajmurmann]

It does. Maybe we should fix that instead of constantly trying to disempower it. Conversations in the US in particular always get conducted as if government had to be bad and is out definition disconnected from the people. We have technologies like approval voting to name one that could improve this. It's insane that you have to hijack one of two parties to bring any change. We must have a functioning government! We must stop working around that.

How the government makes decisions aside, for this concrete case, the money the government pays with is ultimately the tax payer money. So why not buy the received yourself? I don't want a receiver and I don't want to pay for yours. I don't even understand why it's not all just internet at this point.

[ams6110]

> Conversations in the US in particular always get conducted as if government had to be bad...

Yes, that is generally the classical conservative point of view (as distinct from the current Republican party, which has been imploding for a while now).

This point of view holds that government should be small and basically its responsibilities are common defense, protecting and defending individual rights, and bringing bad actors to justice.

> We must have a functioning government! We must stop working around that.

Beyond the above definition, there can be no "functioning" government, because the more power given to government the more corrupt and self-serving it becomes. This is due to inherent imperfection in human nature and can't be avoided.