| So we're going to let incompetents govern incompetently for what exists and ask them to govern competently for NEW things? How peculiar. Believing the government to be incompetent is a self-fulfilling prophecy: - Only the incompetent or apathetic will choose to work for government and take the hit to their personal reputation. - Underfunding leads to underperformance which leads to perceptions of incompetence which leads to underfunding. - True incompetence, corruption, etc. start getting ignored as just "that's how the government is," so nobody tries to fix anything. - Those who have a financial interest in reducing the capabilities of government will "starve the beast" and make it progressively more incompetent. There are many functions of government that, though they could always do better, make the world better than it would be in their absence: fire departments, paramedics, infrastructure management (in areas where this is actually done reasonably well), utilities, financial crimes enforcement, agricultural and pharmaceutical quality enforcement, etc. We're already pretty far down this road of destruction of competence, so I'm not sure how to turn things around, but that doesn't mean we have to keep driving forward into the land of feudalistic anarchocapitalism. |