[robomartin]

> Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.

Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions.

This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world that I see emanate from your comment. This is plain and simple: Government incompetence, fraud and theft.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with private industry.

This also has nothing whatsoever to do with unemployment rate. You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.

And the connection to maximizing profits is even funnier. Do you realize that a company that maximizes profits pays more taxes? Do you realize that a person who maximizes profits through higher salaries or investments pays more taxes? Which means that the government has more money to allocate towards fixing the problems you noted?

[dacops]

I have stopped. I get chastised constantly for it. Leftist candidates are rare, most mainline dems are center right. I catch so much flak from vote blue no matter who types (who then go out and don't vote for Mamdani).

If candidates want my vote, they can offer literally anything as a concession. I'm not holding some purity standard.

> You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.

You doing think there are other needs people have? Social needs, where years of customer service experience would be desirable? Or financial advice? Potholes are a stand in. Think bigger.

[robomartin]

> Think bigger.

Think clearly, correctly and grounded in reality.

[warumdarum]

But socialist culture leads to corruption repeatetly in all socities where the experiment is run ?

[dacops]

Same with capitalist governments?

I don't think corruption is a left/right axis like that.

And I don't know, maybe it's early days, but Mamdani seems less corrupt than his predecessors.

[pc86]

It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.

[tmoertel]

> It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.

If only there were a system to align incentives toward a common good under the assumption that everyone is corrupt and will therefore seek to maximize their own interests....

[thrance]

What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy? No one's making any money from that. But it causes damages to everyone.

You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...

[tmoertel]

> What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy?

Well, in a purely capitalist economy, the answer would be property rights, competition, and liability. For example, a road would be owned by someone, and you could sue that someone for damages if the road damaged your car. A road owner could discharge liability risk by purchacing insurance, and insurance underwriters could require some minimum standard of maintenance from owners in exchange.

> You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...

The whole point of the article that spawned these discussions is that society has already delegated the responsibility for fixing potholes to the government, and the government is doing a crappy enough job of fixing potholes that "art activists" need to make potholes into public art projects to get the government to actually do its job.

[thrance]

Some libertarians moved in the small town of Grafton, NH [0], with the explicit goal of turning it into a "Free Town".

> This resulted in eliminating funding to the county's senior-citizens council, town offices going unheated during the winter, poorly maintained roads filled with potholes, and the Grafton Police Department being reduced to one officer (the police chief), who said he was unable to answer calls for service as the town had no money to repair the one police vehicle left. Other issues were inconsistent basic public services, such as trash collection.

Most roads are unprofitable individually, but still beneficial to the greater economy. It's very unrealistic to expect private individuals to build and maintain them. And the logistics of paying for every street one drives one, and the profiteering this enables sounds hellish.

There was a time when the government was able to build and fix stuff. We should probably get to fixing that, by kicking out the parasitic contracters, actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages, taxing the ever-increasing wealth of the top 1%, etc. Not by privatizing roads, which is a nonsensical idea that failed miserably anytime it was tried.

The golden age of America (and the West) happened when redistributive taxation was maximal and the government had the means and the will to improve citizens life. We've been privatizing stuff ever since the 1980s with arguably disastrous results. It's time we came back to first base.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton%2C_New_Hampshire

[pc86]

No but you don't understand they're on the right team so I have to vote for them.