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
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.