[jbstack]

Aside from the fact that there's a subjective definition problem here (how do we decide what people "need"?), I think this an unrealistic view. By this definition, every government that has ever existed or ever will exist is a "bad" government because no government can ever tackle every single problem 100% of the time. Many problems are extremely difficult to solve (e.g. global warming), and others simply cannot be solved without creating other problems.

For example, people "need" access to healthcare, but there's essentially an unlimited amount of money you could spend to keep improving healthcare (e.g. opting for increasingly expensive treatments with diminishing returns on health outcomes). The more money you allocate to healthcare, the less you have available to spend on other things that people "need". Sure, you can tax more up to a point, but eventually that tap runs dry and you're forced to reallocate existing resources.

As another example, people "need" criminals to be punished in order to be able to live in a safe a crime-free society. People also "need" to not be put in prison when they are innocent. But you can never be 100% sure that a convicted criminal actually committed the crime. Locking up criminals implies by necessity that you will also lock up some innocent people. No government can solve both of these problems simultaneously which means they are all "bad".

Even the most competent "good" government ultimately has to select among which "bad" things it is going to allow to continue and which it will solve.

[danans]

> Sure, you can tax more up to a point, but eventually that tap runs dry and you're forced to reallocate existing resources.

Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few.

A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.

[jbstack]

> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less

Who is "we"? We're talking about governments in general ("good" vs "bad" ones), and I have no idea what jurisdiction you are referring to.

In any case, I didn't say the tap is dry. I said if you keep raising taxes it will eventually run dry. Or to put it another way, taxes are not an unlimited resource that you can keep increasing as much as you'd like. At some point you'll hit a ceiling where raising taxes any further doesn't produce additional tax revenue.

For example, as you raise income tax rates, people have less incentive to advance their careers (e.g. by chasing promotions or improving their skills), and people have more incentive to leave the jurisdiction and go somewhere with lower taxes. Up to a point, the increase in tax rates produces a net extra revenue for the government. Above a certain point, the number of people who stop paying taxes (e.g. by leaving or by working less) outweighs the gains from those who continue to pay. This is why you'll rarely see any government with excessively high top-bracket tax rates (e.g. 60 - 100%), because it results in tax losses.

[MrOwen]

How are you coming to the conclusion that it will run dry? For example, in the US, arguably the most prosperous period here was in the first half of the 1900s. It is when Roosevelt's New Deal went into place and the US experienced extraordinary growth and prosperity. Do you know what also coincided with this? The marginal income tax rate. From wikipedia:

> For tax years 1944 through 1951, the highest marginal tax rate for individuals was 91%, increasing to 92% for 1952 and 1953, and reverting to 91% 1954 through 1963.

Since that time, the income tax rate has declined, especially for the higher brackets. From my perspective, it kinda just sounds like wealthy people got greedy and they were able to advocate for income tax changes. Back then, they couldn't pull as much funny business as they do today with high compensation modalities ($1 trillion for Musk?) so they opted for marginal tax rate reduction. But there's no evidence from what I can see that the the money was about to "run dry." Quite the opposite it seems. Even in nordic countries, the money is not "running dry". They have great support systems in large part because of the high marginal tax rates.

[jbstack]

Consider what would happen if the tax rate was 100% across all tax types, and you'll probably see then how there's an upper limit to how much tax revenue can be raised by a government. Would you get up and go to work if you got to keep 0% of your earnings? How about if you got to keep 1% of them? 2%?

Surely we can agree that there is a threshold, even if we don't agree where that threshold is. That's all there is to the point I'm trying to make: tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like.

[danans]

> tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like.

That's a strawman. There are no proposals for a 100% tax across tax types. There is an argument for reversing the direction of the last several decades in which taxes on the wealthiest have been dramatically cut.

[jonas21]

> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less.

Assuming "we" means the United States, this isn't really true. Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably stable, not just since the 1980s, but since the end of World War II [1].

The long-term average since 1945 is 16.85%, the average in the 1970s (i.e. the decade before the 80s) was 16.76%, and the average in the 2020s is 16.96%.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

[b112]

Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few.

A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.

Others have attempted to refute your above statement, but it's not really relevant. Your response does not really align with the parent post, because at no point did the post you replied to say "We need to tax less all the time!" or even "we need to tax less!" or "we cannot have better health care".

None of these things were said, advocated for, or espoused as a position.

Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what".

This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?

[danans]

> Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what".

> This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?

Sure. That's like saying fire is hot and water is wet. The fact that tradeoffs obviously exist doesn't mean we can make meaningful changes to improve things.

[b112]

I think you mean "doesn't mean we can't", but you seem to be hyper-focusing on the summary statement I wrote, of the original author's post. That summary statement was in place to explain why your original post wasn't addressing the issue.

But that statement was summarizing a portion of the original author's post. If placed back in the context it came from, you can see the original author was not saying we cannot make meaningful changes. At all.

Instead, the author was said:

Aside from the fact that there's a subjective definition problem here (how do we decide what people "need"?), I think this an unrealistic view. By this definition, every government that has ever existed or ever will exist is a "bad" government because no government can ever tackle every single problem 100% of the time. Many problems are extremely difficult to solve (e.g. global warming), and others simply cannot be solved without creating other problems.

Thus, they are not defining this as a "we cannot improve things", but instead "if we improve things, some will see that as bad" conjoined with "in other cases, we improve things, but not as fast/completely as desired".

As far as I can see, there is not a single point that the original author said we cannot improve things. They don't even hint at that.

[dragonwriter]

> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less.

In the US at least, that’s the perception because the tax cuts get a lot more publicity than the increases; everyone know that Reagan passed what was, to that time, the biggest (at least in aggregate nominal terms) tax cut in US history, fewer know that he followed it with the biggest increase.

But what has actually happened is a series of tax burden shifts (often, downward from the wealthiest, though some have been the other way or largely orthogonal to wealth.)

[attila-lendvai]

sure, but does government prevent wealth inequality, or maybe the very cause of it?

(research hint: inflation, and that millennia old quote/insight: the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government...)

[danans]

> sure, but does government prevent wealth inequality, or maybe the very cause of it?

Neither. Government is just the system through which policy that either greatness or lessens inequality is implemented. For example, government can decrease an inheritance tax, therefore increasing inequality, or they can do the opposite to reverse it.

[estimator7292]

Everything is bad if we simply redefine "good" to mean "immaculately perfect and infallible in literally all conceivable scenarios"

[jbstack]

Sure. But the original commenter's point that whether a government is "good" or "bad" is subjective because it's dependent on people's views. Other commenters objected to that and appear to see it as objective: a government is either clearly good or clearly bad, and there's no debate to be had.

The reality however is that all governments are a mixture of good and bad, and different people will see that mixture in different proportions. One person might overlook the fact that their government funds the Israeli military because their government does plenty of other "good" things to make up for it. Another person might find that to be a completely unacceptable compromise.

[npoc]

There is no man-made global warming crisis. The earth is in fact one of the coldest periods in history.

Thoroughly explained here: https://youtu.be/KDwCUAueLUU

What the "man-made global warming crisis" is, is an example of how a corrupt/captured state will overreach and control the people for its own gain through manipulation. Many governments are captured by the now global financial system that has almost unlimited power due to its money printers. It charges interest on money that it prints out of thin air. By leveraging its existing power to steer the governments to spend money it is able to effectively spend printed money (governemnt loans) on itself and then receive interest on that money as a bonus. A positive feedback loop that ends in global domination by the unelected financial system with the national and international central banks at its heart. Even worse is that it's power obtained essentially through fraud - it's all based on lending out something for interest that isn't theirs. It started with them lending out gold that people had given them to safely look after in their vaults.

[jbstack]

I disagree strongly with you on this, but nonetheless I think you've proven the point that the original comment was making i.e. that what constitutes a "good" or a "bad" government is subject to people's views.

In my view, a government that does nothing to tackle global warming is "bad". In your view, a government that spends resources on something you think is a fraud, is also "bad". We can't both be right.

[npoc]

We can both be right - when man-made global warming isn't actually a thing.

I agree that

> a government that does nothing to tackle global warming is "bad"

and I think you would likely also agree that

> a government that spends resources on something you think is a fraud, is also "bad"

The only difference is that it has managed to convince you that man-made global warming is real, just like it did me for a long time.

[b112]

Nonsense. The Earth used to be a boiling lump of magma at once point before it cooled, but guess what -- humans can't live on liquid rock. Warmest or coolest is irrelevant over the lifetime of the Earth. What matters is "modern humans".

Global warming is indeed real. Effective change doesn't have to cost a dime. An example is forcing people to buy electric cars at some point. The government spends nothing, people just buy new cars when their old cars expire, now people are driving new cars. Solved.

(you may notice that incentives are gone in most countries now)

And if the weirdos would stop trying to crush every tiny part of carbon emissions, dams provide an immense amount of cheap, clean power once built. We can even make concrete using low-emission methods. Regardless, dams are far better than coal or gas (yes they are random anti-concrete weirdos), so moving on a path to 'better' is laudable and helpful.

(Yes, anti-concrete weirdos are either useful idiots or secret lobbyists. Why? Well, my city puts more concrete into new basements in a single year, than go into a dam that lasts 50 years. Yet I only hear people blather on about dams, which would save immense pollution from coal, the worst polluter it would replace. Also, I've now out-conspiracied the conspiracy guy I'm replying to.)

Power plants expire, whether gas, coal, etc, and instead of revamp you slowly build new, and expire the old.

None of this has to cost. There is no cabal to enact global warming related change.

[npoc]

To clarify I meant over the last 5 million years.

There has been no man-made climate change during the period of "modern humans" either.

It's not a conspiracy as such - it helps to think of government and corporations as an AI. A hive intelligence with constraints and goals. The constraint is to operate within legislation and keep the people on board, the reward/goal is to acquire money/power.

At this stage the financial system (which we gave a money printer!) has obtained enough power to steer legislation in its favour and keep the people on board though manipulation of the mainstream media and education.

Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.

I completely agree that there's no reason why we can't replace power plants with more environmentally friendly ones as they are retired, but ask yourself why Germany then has shut down it's fully operational nuclear power plants. Even with energy shortage and the many of the plants ready to be turned back on tomorrow, the state refuses to.

[n4r9]

Manmade climate change is in the context of the last two millenia. The issue is not just the absolute temperature but the rate of change and human survivability. Homo sapiens only evolved ~200k years ago.

[n4r9]

Requiring people to watch a 1hr+ video to understand your argument is a big red flag.

[npoc]

Why's that? A topic as big as this takes quite a lot of refuting.

If you're interested in finding the truth, then you'll at least begin watching it to see if it offers any promise.

[const_cast]

The trouble with videos is you can just... choose not to include stuff that obviously refutes your argument.

The reality is that global warming is definitely happening, and also the Earth is definitely not flat. But it's pretty easy to make a super convincing argument that the Earth is flat - you just don't mention any of the math behind why the Earth is round and then you can have a 5 hour long video filled to the brim with evidence the Earth is flat.

And it's not even lying. We're not saying anything that's not true. We're just choosing to omit data and evidence that proves us wrong. We can even include fake data and evidence, if we want, and refute that - ie build a strawman.

[npoc]

But surely that holds true for any evidence? Much of the video is showing how (and why) the government-funded evidence for global warming is wrong.

[n4r9]

Videos are a terrible way to convey logical arguments. It's much harder to skip back and forth, search for specific bits, etc ... . They're for entertainment, which encourages a suspension of critical thinking. If you're confident there's a solid argument to be made, make it in text so it can easily be analysed and challenged.

[npoc]

I disagree completely. Videos allow you to time-stamp exact moments for reference and provide animated evidence, rather than just stills. Some videos are meant for entertainment, others are not. Same goes for books and other text-based media. Life itself is presented to our brains in a dynamic audio-visual format - does that encourage the suspension of critical thinking, or does it provide more nuance not available in just words and static pictures?

[n4r9]

> Videos allow you to ... provide animated evidence.

If you want to do that, far better to embed animations in a mostly-textual doc.

> Life itself is presented to our brains in a dynamic audio-visual format ... does that encourage the suspension of critical thinking?

Yes, to an extent. Or at least text allows critical thinking more easily than the average conversation does. Text makes it really easy to pause and think for a moment before reading on. Or to check back on something you vaguely remember reading beforehand. It's a more active form of ingest than watching a video. Video-makers have many more techniques at their disposal to slip their narrative past critical filters, such as varying the speed of delivery, or using music to invoke emotional reactions.

[n4r9]

I watched the first ten minutes. It's the standard boring exercise of cherry picking a few theoretical physicists who weigh in on climate science despite having little to no experience in it.

[npoc]

Well, I'm afraid that that only goes to prove errors in your intuition and critical thinking skills. Your facts are incorrect and your logic uses an appeal to (lack of) authority fallacy.

[hgomersall]

Thoroughly debunked here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/fake-graphs-and... And here: https://science.feedback.org/review/review-climate-the-movie...

That film is full of misleading nonsense. Like, charts that have been altered to apparently suit a narrative.