[kovezd]

While the critique is valid, that does not offer a path to the solution.

Utilitarism is the ruling moral philosophy, and the only possible countermeasure is externalities but that depends on an effective government which is even more unlikely that asking for ethical behavior to corporations.

[alpinisme]

That may be widely believed but there are plenty of government institutions that actually function well. Libraries are a good example.

What’s more: the belief in govt “inefficiency” is one of the hardest to overcome factors that makes it hard to build good institutions, leading to a vicious cycle.

[conception]

Exactly, people who think the government is inefficient has never worked at any company of scale ever. All large organizations are inefficient.

A major problem of the US is just corruption. If people went to jail for things like congressional insider trading, we’d solve a lot of these issues.

[jibe]

All large organizations are inefficient.

I agree, and that’s the case for dismantling as much of the federal government as possible - it is too big to work. Break up Apple, Google, Amazon, Washington DC.

[conception]

You’re forgetting the corollary - all small organizations are also inefficient, just at different things.

It’s all trade offs - do you want everyone in your country to have a baseline education that can be relied on as a given but perhaps it suffers in its administration and effectiveness? Or are you OK with pockets of your country having tremendous quality of education and others having very poor quality, as an example.

[pergadad]

Public utilities and services are the default and work well in the majority of developed countries. This is true for everything from local transport to water distribution. As the joke says "universal healthcare is so difficult to get right that only all developed countries except the US have managed to put it in place".

[markdown]

Not to mention all the developing countries that have universal healthcare.