[mixdup]

>that all inefficiency is caused by governments

Forget about the evidence of other countries (which is completely valid), I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective

In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top. If everyone agreed that, once we make a choice on what the government is going to do we should do it well, we could have government services that are just as effective as whatever private enterprise example people always like to cite (being from the South it's usually the Chick Fil A drive-thru)

[moduspol]

And that's why our west coast cities, which are not run by the half that hates government, are shining beacons of just how effective and successful governments can be.

[ksenzee]

There's this idea that west coast cities are shitholes, and honestly it's BS. I live in the Seattle suburbs and I'm downtown regularly, and the only obvious problem is the public disorder visited on us all by Martin v. Boise. It's pretty clear from housing prices that wealthy people are still happy living in Seattle: the market is speaking loudly. Don't get me wrong—I live in the suburbs for a reason, you couldn't pay me enough to live in Seattle—but as cities go, it's fine. Republicans who hate big disorderly cities like I do should just enjoy their suburban parking lots and breathing room, and quit pretending city chaos equals Democratic mismanagement.

[int_19h]

I agree that in many cases there isn't any substance behind the talk. Yet the single largest state-to-state flow of people is from California to Texas, not the other way around; surely there's something objective that is driving that. And, given the time and effort required for such a move, it's not something most people would do on a whim without doing at least some research.

[ksenzee]

Hm. We have plenty of Washington-to-Texas migration from the suburbs, and there's no serious contention that, say, Auburn and Kent are mismanaged by Democrats. I know multiple families who have left for Texas in the last few years, and it wasn't "this place has crap government," it was "this place is woke." That is, they wanted more "traditional values" in their kids' schools and fewer BLM and pride flags. To me that's a valid and objective reason to leave (and honestly they're welcome to go, I don't want them running for school board even if we are friends) but it doesn't support the contention that government here is incompetent. It just means government here is socially liberal, which it unquestionably is.

[int_19h]

There are certainly people leaving for these reasons. Yet polls also show that there are also plenty of left-leaning folk who move.

[joshuamorton]

"why is the largest single state transfer from the largest state by population to the second largest state by population" is perhaps not that surprising a result.

[int_19h]

Perhaps, but look at the entire people. California is losing people; Texas is gaining them. And it's not just California that has a net outflow to red states; New York and Illinois are also seeing an outflow.

[rayiner]

An even better comparison in California to California. The year Apple IPOed, Reagan handily won California. Santa Clara County only voted a democrat for President twice between 1948 and 1987–LBJ (who won 20 points nationwide), and weirdly enough Hubert Humphrey. In the founding and golden ages of Silicon Valley, it was a red suburb in a red state. It was like what Florida is now.

[int_19h]

Yeah, no. GOP today has very little semblance to GOP of Reagan times (although the seeds of the present insanity have been sown then, and even earlier - Trumpism is a perfectly logical end result of Birchers, "moral majority" etc). And there's nothing "golden age" about Florida today; certainly not when it comes to quality of governance.

[rayiner]

In terms of tone, it’s quite different, but in terms of governance Trump’s term was a pretty standard GOP term with the exception of immigration and foreign policy—which aren’t issues at the state level. Tax cuts, bootstraps, etc.

Calling Trumpism an extension of Bircherism is a coping mechanism, seeing as how the GOP is winning record shares of minorities under Trump. Instead, the Trump GOP is a hybrid of the Reagan GOP and Jacksonian/Jeffersonian populism. The opposition to immigration given the prospect of cultural change also appeals to many immigrants who left those places for good reasons. My parents immigrated to Ronald Regan's America, not Kamala Harris's America.

Florida is a tremendously well governed state. It has great schools, low taxes, low debt, a booming economy, etc. I know multiple families that moved there from Illinois and New York in the last couple of years.

[intended]

COVID.

Return to office seems to be changing that flow.

[rayiner]

That doesn’t really respond to the point, though. Is Seattle’s government efficient and effective? To my recollection, Seattle doesn’t have great public services.

[ksenzee]

It doesn't look to me (from 20 miles away) as if Seattle's government is notably efficient or effective, and I'd even say one-party rule is partly to blame: opposition parties serve a useful purpose. But I don't think the standard Republican sneer of "look what a crappy job the Democrats do of running the big cities" makes any sense, either. The things Republicans are pointing at as symptoms of bad Democratic government are mostly just side effects of what people in American cities like.

[loeg]

Seattle's 2021 budget was $5.5B against a population of 734k or about $7,500/head. Bellevue, WA's 2021 budget was $1.7B for a population of 149k, or $11,400/head. To pick a random DC suburb as a comparison, Alexandria's 2021 budget was $955M for a population of 155k or about $6,200/head.

[jandrewrogers]

I think there is a correct perception that many west coast cities are shitholes relative to what their per capita tax expenditures buys in most other cities. It is an argument about relative ROI, not absolute quality of life. If I spend $150k on a car, I don’t expect a used Toyota Corolla.

Cities like Seattle generate inexplicably little public value for the extremely high per capita spending. It should be much nicer for the amount of money it spends. The quality of services relative to expenditure is not defensible. Many cities do far more with far less. I’ve lived in Seattle around downtown for a long time, but it is far from the only city I spend time in. If per capita spending was correlated with quality of city experience, Seattle should be one of the best cities in the world to live in, but I don’t think anyone would make the argument that this is the case. As with San Francisco, most of that taxpayer money is lit on fire with no accountability and no contribution to the public good.

This is similar to the observation that on the same stretch of highway, California somehow manages to spend 10x per mile as its neighbors for visibly and audibly worse roads. People have made jokes about it for decades because the contrast is so stark if you drive on those roads.

It is not unreasonable for taxpayers to expect better than what is available in other cities when they are spending several-fold what those other cities are to achieve, at best, the same results. It doesn’t have to be a total shithole to be grossly mismanaged. People in Seattle spend enough tax money per capita that their city experience is far worse than what they have a right to expect.

It isn’t a political issue.

[ksenzee]

I agree with almost everything here, but this isn't what I'm referring to. What I hear ad nauseam is not that SEA/PDX/SFO are used Corollas but that they're Pintos with fire coming out the tail end. If what you're hearing from Republicans is "Seattle is an ok city but should have much lower taxes for the services they get" then I want to know what media you consume, so I can recommend it to my right-wing acquaintances.

[nouveaux]

I'll bite. In what ways are non west coast cities is more efficient than west coast cities?

[moduspol]

I'm not sure they would be. I limited to "west coast" cities because other cities' issues are sometimes blamed on Republican governors. West coast cities typically aren't.

[refurb]

Look at budgets per capita.

[TheCoelacanth]

All cities worth mentioning are run by the half that doesn't hate government.

[wernercd]

"shining beacons" The same cities in states that are now in massive deficits? or covered in feces? with massive increases in drug and homeless problems? The same cities that have people feeling from states because of overregulation and overtaxation?

Those are the shining beacons of success?

[rayiner]

> In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top.

How are republicans sabotaging New York City, San Francisco, etc? Historically, half of all governmental spending in the country happens at the state and local level—-and that comprises most of the services that affect people’s daily lives the most. Blue states could have big, active, well run governments if that were possible, and republicans could do very little to “sabotage” them.

In practice, the most well-run places in the country tend to be moderate red areas where government has limited objectives but does it well. I grew up in red state Virginia and it was very well run. When California was well run, it was a red state. Florida is a well run state. I live in a Romney ‘12 county in a blue state, and it’s really well run, unlike Baltimore, where I used to live. I actually love going to the county landfill/recycling center, because it’s so neat and orderly and well run.

[ants_everywhere]

> I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective

The big incentive problem here is that democracies reduce the power held by private individuals. So (primarily wealthy, powerful) private individuals have an incentive to market the idea that government is inefficient to reduce the impact of decisions made by democratic choice.

This same conflict occurs throughout history. For example, the Magna Carta was a major concession of the power of the English King to lower nobility. There are always going to be people who dream of running their own fiefdom and see democracy as at best a nuisance and at worst an active impediment.

[tbrownaw]

> For example, the Magna Carta was a major concession of the power of the English King to lower nobility. There are always going to be people who dream of running their own fiefdom and see democracy as at best a nuisance and at worst an active impediment.

...what? Are you seriously trying to claim that absolute monarchy is a form of democracy?

[ants_everywhere]

The opposite. Absolute monarchy is essentially when an individual (the monarch) has absolute power over a fiefdom. Similarly to how slave-owning plantation owners wielded near-absolute power over their plantation.

What I'm saying is that there has always been this conflict where (some) private individuals want absolute reign over others, and democracy limits this power. The Magna Carta is just one classical example of that.

The distinction between private and public is a little blurred when it comes to absolute monarchs, but the general trend is that the more absolute power a monarch has, the more they're running it essentially as a private estate. That's why lists of the wealthiest people in history often include rulers with absolute power.

Due to the conflict, the private power of monarchs has weakened. That's why, for example, in The Crown we see a monarchy that has to concern itself with public perception and the Prime Minister. But William the Conquerer essentially owned much of England.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective

The more general argument is that monopolies are inefficient, and most instances of government programs are monopolies.

> In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail.

This is uncharitable. It's more accurate to say that they expect it to fail and hate government programs because they regard them as inefficient and net harmful on average.

> If everyone agreed that, once we make a choice on what the government is going to do we should do it well, we could have government services that are just as effective as whatever private enterprise example people always like to cite

The inefficiency is caused by the principal-agent problem more than anybody's ideology. Even if every politician wanted and expected the government to be effective, you still have the problem where a government program is providing a service consumed by e.g. 5% of the population and is serving 20% of them poorly. This is only 1% of the voters, who themselves have to balance their vote against their positions on every other issue on the ballot, whereas in a competitive market the company doing that would be losing 20% of their customers to a competitor and a competitor would be available to satisfy that 20% of the customers.

Meanwhile if a program is inefficient but its total cost is <1% of the total government budget, nobody is paying attention to it, but the same is true of most other programs which causes the average efficiency to be poor. Whereas the proprietor of a small business which is <1% of the economy is going to care quite a lot if it's wasting money and be paying attention to that business in particular, because it's their business and it's their money.

We don't have great solutions for these in the public sector. The best you can say is that sometimes it's worth it. For example, every taxpayer can use tax filing software and it has no unit cost, so even if the government is less efficient than a private company, that could still be worth it because you can spread the fixed cost of developing it over so many people. This is a general argument for the government to create and publish open source software whenever there is a reasonable expectation it would be widely used.

What it isn't is a general argument for government programs, because products with zero unit cost are relatively uncommon and so are software products that are both widely used (as opposed to having a particular niche) but not already well-served by existing free software. Software in the service of regulatory compliance is unusually well-suited to being published by the government. (And they should definitely be publishing the source code.)

[Buttons840]

> The more general argument is that monopolies are inefficient, and most instances of government programs are monopolies.

Even more general, markets where it is hard for new competitors to enter are inefficient. It's perfectly possible for a market with 10 or 20 competitors to stop competing for mutual benefit. I'd even argue a monopoly (a single dominant company) is fine, so long as it's easy for competitors to enter the market.

Consider the WW1 Christmas truce and other fraternizations. If the same actors are together long enough, they'll act for mutual ease. That was a good thing in WW1, but it's not a good thing when companies stop competing in a capitalist society.

[BurningFrog]

> It's perfectly possible for a market with 10 or 20 competitors to stop competing for mutual benefit.

As I remember it, the empirical research says two competitors can keep a stable monopoly cartel going for a long time. three can maybe do it for a while. With larger numbers things get very unstable.

[Buttons840]

Source? I would enjoy reading more about this. I wonder if this was a simulation or an observational study of real markets?

[AnthonyMouse]

> I wonder if this was a simulation or an observational study of real markets?

It's kind of both.

Try to name a market where the largest company in the market has <15% market share but they still have a successful cartel going. They exist but you're going to keep finding that their enforcement mechanism is some kind of violence or (equivalently, through the government's monopoly on violence) regulatory capture.

Drug cartels can have lots of members because they murder you for defecting. Landlords collude through zoning boards. OPEC is literally a cartel of governments.

You can also kind of reason this out.

Suppose a market has two companies and the smaller one has 40% market share. If they could increase their market share to 60% by cutting their margins in half, that's losing money, so screw that. The bigger company doesn't even have to buy them off.

Suppose a market has eleven companies and the smallest one has 1% market share. If they could increase their market share to 20% by cutting their margins in half, they're making 10 times more than they do now. The other companies would have to buy them off. But how? More market share without lowering prices? Even if they could arrange it, any company with less than 10% market share would rather have 20% at half the margins, but in a market of eleven the smallest company can't have more than 9% without making someone else the smallest company. And that's if having the lowest price only gets you 20% market share and not more.

Now, you can make up numbers that allow coordination with arbitrarily many companies. Maybe lowering your margins to zero doesn't get you any more customers at all and then no one would have any reason to do it. But how many real markets work like that?

[BurningFrog]

I'm not an economist, but I read a lot of what they write, and it seems like an established fact in the field.

[lispybanana]

You're suggesting the half that wants smaller government impedes the day-to-day productivity of the half that wants it bigger?

Some things work well in government given limited resources. Other parts of government seek bigger and bigger budgets to implement ideological goals, no matter their efficiency.

(Any amount of money spent is justified by the end goal since the purpose of government is to print however much money is required to ensure complete social welfare.)

[int_19h]

The half that wants it smaller, when it succeeds, guts the government, with the result being that whatever remains is incapable of properly carrying out the duties it is still assigned.