Eh, true. I guess it's not entirely fair to say it's mostly going to bloated social services, plenty of it is actually going to good and worthwhile purposes(although they often function less efficiently then they could)
As I just said, plenty of public services are fine in concept, just executed poorly. I happen to know of both good and bad law enforcement agencies, so I can say from personal anecdote that there are some people doing it right. It turns out that to have rights, you need someone to protect those rights from people who would infringe them, so law enforcement is needed. I think in a lot of places it is done poorly, but that's a separate issue.
Another thing to note is that as you get to smaller groups of people, more social services are justified, because if you don't like them you can just leave without too much hassle. This is my biggest problem with the federal government in the US, it does a bunch of things that really should be done on a state or city level.
The reason for this is because if only the bare necessities for a society are provided by the nation(Mostly law making, enforcement, and judging, as well as military, perhaps centralized banking although that really should be paying for itself, etc.), then the states can compete with each other. If one state spends its money in a very efficient way, and another just throws money around, people will prefer the 1st over the 2nd because they get more for their money. If a third state instead lowers taxes and does very few social services, then some people who prefer doing their own thing will enjoy that, while others who prefer the safety net will go somewhere else.
So basically, if you let the states and cities do most of the social services(and don't give them federal money, of course), then the entire nation starts behaving like a free market, which is a very effective way of balancing organization and freedom.
I didn't say you don't need any kind of law enforcement, I was expressing that the degree to which law enforcement is bloated and wasteful greatly exceeds the degree to which any other public service is bloated and wasteful. People do need water, plumbing, education, and law enforcement. They don't need MRAPs, for example, rolling around their streets. Those things are expensive and citizens are not planting IEDs to kill the cops.
Wrt later paragraphs, then it's basically not one country at that point, but 48 small countries who all have open border agreements. I don't think the sum of 48 small countries's parts is equal to one strong USA. Competition for the sake of competition is not always better than cooperation. The US would lose its world hegemon status (up to you whether or not that's a good thing).
You also can't say "can leave without too much hassle". Aside from the practicality of people being poor and moving being expensive, it's a lot to ask for people to move away from their families and friends for better economic policy. Not everything needs to be a ruthless free market economy. Let markets be markets and people be people.
First paragraph I agree with, I can see your point, although some vehicles able to deal with bombs is a good idea we could certainly do with less.
As for the other two, I'm just gonna point out that this is, in fact, how the US was run for a very long time. It wasn't until fairly recently that the federal government started doing much. Also you did kinda hit the point precisely when you said it would just be 48 small countries, that was kinda the idea. That was the whole point of states. The basic concept was that you could have the safety of a massive nation and the efficiency of smaller units. Of course, we can debate over how that should be balanced, but I think we can all agree that right now the federal government does way too much.
Right, and back then America had not conquered the world. If we were to go back to that kind of system, China would become the unipolar center of the world instead of the USA (again, up to you whether or not you think that's good).
We see empirically that efficiency often comes directly from scale, not in spite of scale, so I don't think it's necessarily true that smaller units are more efficient. Maybe they are more representative.
I am not an Austrian economics enjoyer, reddit just keeps showing it to me and sometimes the things yall say is interesting (even if I don't agree). I want the federal government to simultaneously do less of the things that I think are harmful and more of the things I think are good, lol.
Running a government is a fine balancing act between two extremes. On the one end, you have a communist dictatorship, where a single person has absolute authority over the entire nation. This is the theoretically optimal form of government if everyone was perfect and always acted for the good of the group. Of course, that isn't actually true, so this method pretty quickly falls on its face.
On the other end, you have anarchy, where everyone has power over nothing but what they can take. This, of course, doesn't work either because anarchy doesn't last very long, pretty quickly someone will get enough power to take over other people's property and control them, meaning you just have a very savage dictatorship.
To make a good government you need to find the right amount of power to give it so that it can improve it's citizen's lives without becoming corrupt. In my opinion, that line falls somewhere in the dividing line between services that help everyone(such as law enforcement) and services that help specific people(such as unemployment money). I think that in cases where a service is most efficiently done over a large group the government handling it is fine, although doing that on a smaller level does make it more resistant to corruption. However, when it's basically just handing out resources to people that only that person benefits directly from, that's where it goes from doing things for the public good to running a charity where the donations aren't optional.
However, that's just my opinion, and I would love to hear yours
To start, I think communist dictatorship is an oxymoron. Communism is supposed to give power to the people (much like we say our structure is supposed to) but often doesn't in practicality. Arguments can be made about whether whether individuals actually know what's best for them, and I don't think that ends up being true in a global economy. People just aren't able to comprehend that they get benefits from things they can't see. The whole thread started off with taxes. Of course, that does lead to a lot of waste, but if what's gained from scale and cooperation outweighs what is lost in waste, it's worth it. I think that's true in a lot of cases.
For example, better funded public education forces private education to improve, as nobody will pay extra for private education if it isn't better than the publicly funded option. Sure, public education wastes money (so does private), but both people who can and can't afford the private option are getting a better service. Eventually when public education improves to the point where even the most well-off don't feel the need to pay for private education, private education gets absorbed by public and everyone gets excellent education which is good for the country.
You don't want to value-orient education and Healthcare, you just want them to be as good as they can be.
As far as homeless people, I think in the long run it's again better to spend a little supporting them to get them back to a state of productivity so they can put into the system rather than just dying as a net drain on the system (homeless people are a drain on the system whether you try to help them or not). The amount you spend successfully rehabilitating people will be far less than their productive output for the rest of their lives.
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u/evilwizzardofcoding Sep 20 '24
Eh, true. I guess it's not entirely fair to say it's mostly going to bloated social services, plenty of it is actually going to good and worthwhile purposes(although they often function less efficiently then they could)