[greedo]

Most of my life I've been told that government is horrible, and that the most terrifying thing to hear is "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." When an entire generation hears the demonization of civil service (though not military service), then it's no wonder that we end up with a government that can't serve us.

[someguydave]

Why isn’t there any political will to completely overhaul civil service hiring, pay, qualifications, “tenure”, and so forth?

[sudosysgen]

This will likely get downvoted, but it seems to be the most accurate explanation.

American culture is not able to understand the common good anymore. And it cannot understand the brutality of politics, nor the need to participate in it. This is the age of children of cages, forgotten in a week for the official opposition to complain about civility on Twitter. Meanwhile other Western countries burn tires and flip over cars for a thousand times less. In non Western countries, people stand up to bullets in order to complain about the government. But this country made mean people on Twitter the main issue in the election cycle, above Healthcare, War and Concentration camps.

The American public has grown soft, largely by design.

[Proziam]

I'm going to give a very cynical response to this, but I believe all of these factors are relevant. I'm also going to be going against the grain of the political leaning of this forum. I hope that we can discuss the points where we agree and avoid getting stuck at the first point of disagreement.

Factors:

1. Typically, people who wish to be in power are not the people who really want to use power for some greater good. Police make great examples because their abuses of power are often made visible, but this issue goes all the way up to the top. To give an example from right this moment, that I'm sure withstands bipartisan scrutiny, just look at how much political posturing and hot air has stalled the Covid-19 stimulus that is currently being negotiated. [1]The last proposal from the dems included identity politics and various climate provisions. Whether you agree with the policies or not doesn't really matter in this case, what sense does it make to fight for these policies right now in this bill?

2. Our political system centralizes all decision-making power into two parties. Each party has massive influence and control, even to the point of 'rigging' their own internal election processes. As such, the average American has substantially less ability to influencer outcomes at the upper tiers of government as they often think they do. This is the reason there was such distrust of parties by the founding fathers. The solution to this is to either have unlimited parties (requires a different voting system, of which there are several viable options) or to have no parties at all. Then there is a need to institute concepts like a public veto/vote for when things go haywire (think Brexit, but ideally without the intentional political incompetence).

3. Removing those in power is a scary affair. If your government decides to do heinous (or criminally stupid) things and there's no 'political will' at the top to change course, the people must intervene. How much peaceful recourse is there? There are finite 'legal' moves to be made, and they all take time. Once you run out of those options or time, the only remaining choices are 'illegal' and thus risky to individuals - and therefore require large groups of people to organize.

This is a problem understood by our founders, evident in their writings. It's also been commonly addressed since the 1800s in sayings like: [2]"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."

4. Both parties in the United States, despite their protestations to the contrary, have proven to have corruption up to their highest levels. [3]Both Democrats and Republicans dumped stock running up to the current crisis - after they were briefed about the risks. There's also intense 'fighting' over entirely manufactured issues. [4]One example I use often is "assault weapons," which are used to commit murder less than half as often as people's fists. It's hard to even imagine how much progress could be made if the same political energy were expended on more impactful social issues. (Targeting poverty which leads to desperation and organized crime might be a good start).

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pelosi-schumer-contagion-11...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

[3]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/coronavirus-trading...

[4]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[someguydave]

I would argue Congress’ power is weak compared to the career civil servants who decide whether policy should actually be implemented or not. Popular politics serves as a complete distraction while unelected bureaucrats make most of the decisions behind the scenes.

[robomartin]

> I'm also going to be going against the grain of the political leaning of this forum. I hope that we can discuss the points where we agree and avoid getting stuck at the first point of disagreement.

I agree 100% with the points you made. These are important points to understand, each with its own set of tentacles and consequences. It is also true that HN (and other fora frequented by a younger generation) tends to lean heavily towards an ideological framework that, from my perspective, tends to be the result of the intense indoctrination our educational institutions have been shoveling for decades.

> 1. Typically, people who wish to be in power are not the people who really want to use power for some greater good.

This is universally true anywhere in the world. Politics is not a profession where altruism reigns. Even with Trump, this is only my opinion, I believe he decided to run because Obama put him down and diminished him in a very public way during that famous WH dinner. Once in the race, and particularly once he won, he clearly decided to do a good job. He has a record for being the only politician who has, so far, delivered on everything he promised during the campaign. Is he altruistic? Well, no, I don't think so. He is as self serving as anyone else, but at least he is (was?) getting important things done.

> does it make to fight for these policies right now in this bill?

I was absolutely baffled by the strategic blunder. Is Pelosi so powerful that nobody dared go against her? What they did is nothing more than sheer madness, not to mention the disgusting stench of using a national emergency of this magnitude to strong-arm the other side into adding irrelevant items to an economic rescue plan.

> 2. Our political system centralizes all decision-making power into two parties.

I've been saying for a long time that our system of government is obsolete. It had a good run, but this makes no sense. A simple example pulled out of the current environment is the gate-keeping of medical decisions by a bunch of 70 year old lawyers in the Senate and a hodge-podge of people in the House. To me it would make sense to decentralize this power and, effectively, have "Vice Presidents" and teams who are not political parties to manage important areas of our country. In other words, you would have a VP of Health and an executive team under him/her. The fact that someone like Trump or Pelosi have power over medical/healthcare policy and actions is a failure of the system.

> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo

The second option should be the most powerful one. However, as we have seen both in the US and elsewhere, the masses are easily manipulated, which can lead to bad decisions. My canonical example of this is the whole Bernie business. In a rational society he would have been laughed out of the political stage decades ago. Yet, here he is. I am not sure how to counter irrationality other than to somehow push hard to change our system of education for greater balance and critical thinking, a task that would not deliver results for a decade or two.

[wutbrodo]

This is an odd conclusion to draw. You're saying that people call the government incompetent, and now they're demonstrating incompetence, and you're convinced that the causality flows from the former to the latter?

[atq2119]

As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good.

As a consequence, too large a fraction of the population and of political leadership don't even try to make government institutions better, and are instead actively standing in the way of people who do try. Instead, they end up dismantling institutions or making them worse when they fail to dismantle them. (Note that this is the semi-official policy of one of your major parties. They call it "starve the beast".)

And yes, this is genuinely different from other countries. Over here, while trust in institutions is often lower than it would ideally be, the vast majority consensus at least of political and media leadership is that government can and should be good. As a consequence there's a significant number of people over here genuinely trying to make better government happen, to at least some success.

It's really no surprise that US government is so dysfunctional, and it's entirely self-inflicted by bad culture.

[wutbrodo]

> As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good.

I'd be wary of outgroup homogeneity bias here. I'm a fairly big-government guy; there are plenty of things the market is sorely ill-equipped to handle where active, competent govt can do tons of good.

But unlike most people on the big-govt side of the discussion, I don't think that it's blasphemy to question why the US govt is so especially incompetent in certain areas (infra construction is a glaring example, etc). Waving it away as "they don't have enough funding to do good things" is undetermined, the kind of answer that people reach for because it seems obvious, not because it's correct (or rather, complete).

While I've decided that big govt is, in many cases, worth the inefficiency, it's still worth asking _why_ it's inefficient and whether we can improve this. I also don't begrudge some very smart friends of mine who've decided that its inefficiency means that decentralizing power is a better path forward. I can guarantee you that all the people I've talked to who feel that way have given it far more thought than the simple-minded stereotypes the GP comment engages in.