[repolfx]

Because none of those things are done by governments. They're done by companies that provide water, food, medicine, airplanes, cars etc.

Governments mostly just insist that good results happen, and can easily cause problems doing even that. Meanwhile other things run directly by governments do have a long track record of being worse than the private sector equivalents, and taxpayer interactions is clearly an important component of that.

[afuchs]

> Because none of those things are done by governments. They're done by companies that provide water, food, medicine, airplanes, cars etc.

Before the US federal government forced companies to act the country's polluted rivers caught fire repeated. The pollution that caused those rivers to catch fire didn't stop because of those companies' own will or because of the market's influence. The government needed to intervene, otherwise the pollution and fires would have continued.

> Governments mostly just insist that good results happen, and can easily cause problems doing even that. Meanwhile other things run directly by governments do have a long track record of being worse than the private sector equivalents, and taxpayer interactions is clearly an important component of that.

This is political dogma and not fact.

Services provided by governments optimize for vastly different outcomes than the private sector. It also seems that many people harshly judge government services while they ignore real problem that occur when those services are privatized.

[weberc2]

> Services provided by governments optimize for vastly different outcomes than the private sector. It also seems that many people harshly judge government services while they ignore real problem that occur when those services are privatized.

I'm not the parent but I started this subthread. I didn't bring this topic up to advocate for privatization; I brought it up to note that advocates for more/bigger government might enjoy more political support if they focused on improving government ROI. Lots of countries have competent governments; I'm certainly sympathetic to those who think we should improve the efficiency of our government before we raise taxes.

[murphysbooks]

I came across this sentence today on a page for a public swimming pool. "Recent ADA changes have required the installation of entry steps and a power lift." [0] It reminded me of this thread.

Most of the value in government is setting standards so that society is more fair to those that have been ignored in the past. It struck me as odd in how they phrased this sentence. Now, I have to admit that the person that wrote the copy for this page has some kind of fetish for sharing building footprint measurements, but not height. So, I don't think copy editing is high on their list of skills.

The federal government was actually designed to be pretty inefficient in order to keep it small and out of people's hair. Government wasn't supposed to be good at making roads. It was supposed to be good at saying how wide those interstate highway lanes should be.

Don't even get me started on federal contract law and the FAR. I think it says somewhere around page 1312 in the FAR that government contracting should be as efficient as possible.

[0] https://www.bristoltn.org/202/Haynesfield-Aquatic-Center