[ikono]

I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the same way you would as a private investor. The federal government has defacto senior equity in every company that is incorporated and/or operates in the US. As a private investor the only upside you get from a loan is the interest. It's not even entirely fair to use a VC type model here as the government will also reap rewards from companies that indirectly benefit from these investments.

Your points regarding state-owned companies is more a case against equity investment and a defense of the loan model. The US government isn't going to go to extreme measures to recoup a billion dollars and because it doesn't have any additional equity there's no other real incentive to prop up the companies that it has loaned money to. The free market is an extremely powerful system that is capable of remarkable things but it's not perfect and there are problems that the free market won't address on it's own (climate change being a poster boy example).

[temphn]

  I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the 
  same way you would as a private investor. 

So, there are different ways to isolate a core philosophical disagreement but I think this may be one of them. In a different context you will hear people say that "the government is not a household" because the USG can print money. OK, so call that one point of view.

Another point of view looks at the largest and most successful companies (like Apple, Google, et alia) and compares them to the smallest countries (like Iceland). Interestingly, you can do the math to see that Iceland gets about $5.6B of tax revenue with a population of 320,000, while Apple makes $156B with an employee base of about 73,000. This indicates that Apple is about 120X more efficient in terms of dollars generated per person; indeed, significantly more so in that tax payments are more on the involuntary side while Apple purchases are more on the voluntary side.

You can extend the same kind of analysis to Fortune 500 companies and many small countries. This is a very interesting exercise because no one disputes that the Fortune 500 companies can be evaluated by private investors, or that the countries have flags, fiscal policies, and the like. And yet the former outperform the latter by a lot on metrics like this.

So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies. One not-so-bad way to think of it is that a citizen is buying a huge package of goods from the government, like cable bundling on steroids, and can only switch service providers by moving.

But, in any case, because we disagree on that point we'll probably also disagree on others. For example, the senior equity thing...are you stating the USG can exercise eminent domain and/or nationalize a company at will? I agree that in practice they have done this, but I at least don't believe this is a good thing.

Anyway, yeah, that's the crux of it: one group does not believe governments should be judged like companies, another group believes they should. Hopefully you can at least see our point of view even if you don't decide to convert :)

[redler]

I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars generated per person" is the only valid measure of the success of a government as compared to the success of a large corporation. So how do you factor in all the other measures of success in such an evaluation?

Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash. Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will never make a profit, and governments are the major organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that are often left to such pursuits.

[natural219]

It continues to shock me how many people believe that profit-seeking or optimizing production is "immoral". I have nothing much to say about it, since this position is fundamentally irreconcilable with the core ideas of capitalism, which I use as a framework to view all sorts of different aspects of life that become problematic if we believe that people are somehow duped into spending their money or time at a utility loss to themselves.

[redler]

You're responding to something I did not say. I said "amoral". It's different.

[temphn]

  I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars 
  generated per person" is the only valid measure of the 
  success of a government

Sure, it isn't the only measure of success, but if this number is very low then that is (I would argue) a measure of failure. "Dollars generated per person" = tax-revenues per person is very similar to GDP-per-capita. And a high GDP-per-capita means you can spend on healthcare, earthquake proof buildings, and all kinds of standard-of-living improving stuff.

  So how do you factor in all the other measures of success 
  in such an evaluation?

I think that many -- not all -- are downstream of dollars generated per person. The more dollars per person, the more money for science, for public works, for roads and bridges, for charity, for whatever you want. You can't buy love, but you can buy most of the lower level items in Maslow's hierarchy, no?

  Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the 
  ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of 
  business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough 
  profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral 
  obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose 
  purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash. 
  Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will 
  never make a profit, and governments are the major 
  organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that 
  are often left to such pursuits.

Sure. But I guess my claim is that in order to pursue those other "lines of business", governments must still post a profit (more tax/fees than expenditures). The alternate school of thought (promoted by Cheney and Krugman alike) says that deficits don't matter and that governments cannot go bankrupt.

[I might also quibble with your use of the term "amoral" to describe businesses and "moral" to describe governments, as most of the millions of people dead in the 20th century were killed by governments. You have to kind of go back to the East India Company to find something comparable for businesses (and even that was a public/private hybrid). Anyway, digression, my apologies.]

[redler]

I'm trying to be very careful to avoid responding to things you're not actually saying. This would be more fun to discuss over some beers.

Trying to tiptoe away from Godwin, I'll agree the use of moral/amoral is worth the quibble. Certainly it's people who have morals, and institutions that have, at best, ethics or principles. I'm not trying to argue that governments are moral, although they do take on responsibilities that corporations cannot or would not, and that such responsibilities can create something like a moral obligation -- operating on an axis that does not include a profit factor -- without imbuing the institution with "morals" per se.

[temphn]

Cool, yeah, beer is awesome. Appreciate the discussion.

Another way to express what I'm saying is this:

Individuals do lots of things that aren't directly for profit, like open source or art or helping out a friend. But over the long term they need to create more wealth (apples, chairs, computers, etc.) than they consume.

Groups of various kinds (companies, etc.) do lots of things that aren't for profit, like throwing birthday parties for their members or having their people sponsor charity runs for research. Yet they too need to have wealth creation exceed wealth consumption to survive in the long run.

Municipalities and local governments -- ditto. Municipalities provide services in exchange for property taxes, and they can/do go bankrupt. We're seeing that happen to CA cities now.

Now, a federal government is definitely special in some key ways: it can order guys with guns to your house and coordinates national defense. But you can still model this as a municipality that is competing with other national governments for your tax dollars. Immigration is in part about getting a better deal from country A and moving from country B.

This is not how we've been raised to think about government. Many on the broad political right are sort of emotional about the federal government's defense efforts; many on the broad political left are sort of emotional about the federal government's non-defense efforts. And in our current world it is kind of unpatriotic to just think of them as a service provider: "are they keeping the peace at low cost? are they pursuing the right strategy for long term health?".

There are macroeconomic arguments as well about whether the "government is or should be modeled as a company", but really you do get at a good point in that the idea that government is just a service provider cuts against the grain of American thought, both left and right.

However, it is an interesting line of analysis that is gaining in currency. See for example KP's "USA Inc.", which looks at the USA as if it was a company:

images.businessweek.com/mz/11/10/1110_mz_49meekerusainc.pdf

While physical proximity will always mean banding together for common defense (so long as we are corporeal beings!), I'd argue that the internet makes migration-to-a-better-service-provider a much more feasible option. Facebook facilitates transnationalism: your friends are sometimes nearby, sometimes on other continents, but they often aren't your neighbors. Skype and all these telecommuting tools allow you to work remotely as well.

Moving doesn't have the same cost that it used to. Making the cost of migration plummet could be very important.

[YokoZar]

By this reasoning, a government that operated more efficiently would be less successful. That can't possibly be right.

[ikono]

I certainly understand where you're coming from but obviously disagree at least partially.

There is a difference between saying that the government should invest in and fund all companies and saying that there are cases where the free market will not act in the national best interest on it's own and the government can. The underlying issue here is that oil is subsidized in the US. It's not just the tax benefits to oil companies, it's all the military spending required to maintain undisrupted oil flow from the most unstable regions in the world. We've gotten to the point where we can't just stop cold turkey; so you've got to invest some money to clean up a mess made in the past. I'd love to get to the point where all our energy choices were on a level playing field so the free market could do the work but that just doesn't seem plausible today.

It's cliche at this point, but the space program and DARPA/ARPA investments led to a lot of the technology that enabled the formation and/or success of companies like Apple and Google.

This is off topic but with regard to your some of your other points, it's completely true that the federal government doesn't have to treat it's debt the same way a household does. That doesn't mean it should spend as much as it wants, but it does mean that it can spend a little more than it brings in forever. By senior equity I meant that the government's claims to profits(taxes) are senior to other equity holders.

[saraid216]

> So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies.

If governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies, then companies should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate governments. Otherwise you're putting down a double standard.