One big reason for government failure not mentioned is that it not only undertakes to do more than it reasonably can, or that incentives are wrong, but that what it undertakes is not determined by any reasonable conception of what it should do, but rather by plain and simple grift. Spurious justifications are offered to support programs whose real purpose is social predation, not their ostensible goals. For example, lavish support on specious humanitarian ground of "homeless" encampments, actually open air drug markets, generates huge amounts of money for social service providers, who in turn support the politicians who implement it. Open borders similarly creates huge cash flow for for the social service providers, and similarly benefits the politicians and bureaucrats. The public is reluctant to believe just how corrupt and venal their government is, and so the obvious is ignored and discussions center on bafflement as to why government is failing, even as it is doing what the real beneficiaries, not the ostensible ones, want.
Grift is not the right way to describe the problem with giving contacts to these kinds of organizations. It's more like "systemic embezzlement" combined with a kickback scheme interfacing with the parallel economy of political favor exchange. There are thousands of people who are basically in the extended, shadow Plum Book list of positions to be filled with political appointees. If these organizations were inside the government it would look like the old spoils system, and placing them outside and awarding them contracts is the easy way to circumvent the measures intended to end the spoils system.
One specific case of a possibly egregious "Grift" is the Springfield, Ohio immigration situation. Research for yourself the name George Ten, and his businesses in Springfield.
El Flamingo Club. Bora Bora Sports Bar. Las Margaritas Nightclub. El Cruzero Sports Bar. Los Escorpiones #2. Koko Bongo. El Rinconcito Nightclub. La Condesa. Los Escorpiones #5. The names of 9 bars - the news articles actually identified them as "brothels" disguised as "cantinas" - shut down by the state Alcohol and Beverage Commission last week in conjunction with a federal task force called the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance.
There's a lot of interest in this subect down here. It seems to be a lingering remnant of Protestant do-gooderism. If that goes away, I don't know that anyone would care about the cartels importing prostitutes from south of the border.
The other day when Nate Silver suggested that the only reason the Dems need lose the election is because of immigration, his commenters mostly did not glom on to that. They denied it was a problem, or else they denied that it was a problem for the Dems since they blamed Trump for Biden-Harris not solving it with the migrant-attractor quota plan and building lots of detention camps-of-saints on the border, which they thought everybody must see and agree about. Or they denied that it mattered to people. A number said it personally affected them not at all. Some said it was a way to deflect from the need for more redistribution by blaming a "few brown people".
Houston is my hometown. We used to joke that it sucked because it had no urban planning, no restraints on growth and thus allowance for the development of taste, and of course for its famous no-zoning that meant there were little quirks like a strip club a hundred feet from my high school to which the boys bragged about repairing, and half a dozen more along the nearest big cross-street that ran through the nearby neighborhoods.
Wow, we were naive, thinking our town "sucked" with little idea of the suckitude that awaited, which was ironic because it went hand-in-hand with the city finally starting in on *some* grown-up "beautification" measures and recreation-space efforts and so on, that in isolation - in the absence of mass immigration - would possibly, have actually led to people like me admitting, it's actually improving!
Now it's trying its damnedest to be a third-world city, without the "local", idiosyncratic charm of actual third world cities.
There was presumably a huge amount of dough spent on the operation to "rescue" those 84 unfortunate women, whatever "trafficking" means in this case. Who actually have now won the lottery as they will very likely all be permitted to remain by virtue of having been victims and being folded into the legal system as witnesses.
Were they the customers of this government service? Or the citizenry? As this exercise will in no way lead to change, it's hard to see how the citizenry much benefits. The cartel is set back a space on the game board. Or was the customer the large and "militarized" domestic law enforcement apparatus with, as AK points out, a permanent mission as long as the problem persists?
Because clearly there is no will to solve this particular problem. The solution is obvious and has been rejected by both political parties for decades, until the problem can't be named. We let in too many people. The problem wasn't "failure to vet" lol.
It's most likely not productive to argue about the "right" definitions, but perhaps I can at least clarify by giving my understanding and usage of the terms.
A "grift" is like a fraudulent swindle performed by a con-artist (a kind of 'grifter') to fraudulently and dishonestly convince someone to hand over their money. In the non-political context these are most often single-encounters followed by permanent disengagement / disappearance.
In the political context the word is used to mean something along the lines of a "career strategy based on deceptive fundraising under pretense of a false persona and/or to support a noble purpose but in reality diverting as much of the proceeds to oneself as one can get away with." This is a kind of long-con that operates continuously and for indefinite iterations, not just a "sucker born every minute", but a well into which one can lower one's bucker over and over." A while back I wrote about the "carcinisation" of organizations under intense evolutionary pressure with each other to such up a limited amount of donation dollars, which selects for the kind of tactics and personalities that eventually turn the whole operation into nothing but a grift optimized to use political cover to separate fools from their money. There are few better examples than the SPLC.
Now, the various kinds of corrupt arrangements which involve contracting with the state or manipulating policy for the purpose of personal profit are different kinds of bad behavior which deserve different terminology because they require very different kinds of efforts to counter.
compared to what country and by what metric? neither are rhetorical questions. the federal government is a health insurance company with a military. everything else is a rounding error. the public wants from government:
- stable well paying jobs
- a generous social safety net for retirement
- low inflation
- minimal immigration while the public has a lot less children over many generations
if the government fails to deliver on any of those things, it makes people mad. now i don’t care how good a politician is, they aren’t magicians and they can’t magick away the reality of tradeoffs.
We are getting what we are allowing. Governmental power is derived from "we the people", and our shared duty to ensure their government serves the common good. It's on us, ultimately, and your description of the general public is, unfortunately, accurate.
“There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do. And almost never does government back out of an activity once it gets in.“ Let’s not forget the progress that has been made on the right to carry and possess firearms in America. Or the decision by the Supreme Court to push abortion decisions over to the states. Or the freedom to inhale pot smoke. The Supreme Court has made better decisions these past four plus years.
“The Institute for Justice has won 10 U.S. Supreme Court cases. Collectively, these cases span all our litigation areas. Our victories have vindicated the right to earn an honest living, expanded educational opportunity for millions of children, defended free speech, and strengthened the Constitution’s protection for Americans’ property.”
Patience. We’re wearing the bastards down. Keep writing good Substack posts like this one and don’t forget to enjoy other aspects of life like Israeli folk dancing.
I have worked for several Fortune 100, highly profitable companies. It is still the case that in all of them, middle management was dominated by people who are "good at playing the game of status and power", with little benefit to actually delivering results.
I have experienced that myself. Humans are the same everywhere. But market competition does tend to act a bit like sandpaper, making the status games a little less rough among profit-seeking firms.
I like to note that the decay by mission bureaucratic creep that destroys the competency of government and non-profit institutions also impacts monopoly companies (ATT, IBM, etc of my youth) the same way and destroys the ability to be innovative. It appears an outcome of all "monopolies" who can't fail. Government, nonprofit, and monopolies bureaucratically evolve over time as the internal striver with their with political skills replace the innovators, nerds, and engineers like what happened to Boeing, Bechtel, NASA, March of Dimes (only seniors remember them), etc.
One has to distinguish between bad governance that is due to bad goals and bad governance that is do to bad performance at accomplishing goals. Performance-based bad governance is the government not being competent to do something the leadership actually wants it to do, like building a working, high quality Obamacare website on time. Arnold's reasons are decent explanations for why that happens. But bad-goals-based bad governance is an entirely different problem. Many people would say that a key attribute of "good governance" is a public environment that is very safe, secure, and orderly with low risk of crime. But obviously many people think that accomplishing that goal is "bad governance" if it means arresting too many of the wrong kind of people, and it better governance for the government to tolerate higher levels of crime and disorder than the alternative.
For example, is it good governance or bad governance to know when and where gunshots happen immediately after the weapons are fired, in order to being to quickly respond to incidents and successfully investigate gun crimes? Duh, it's obviously good governance. Fortunately a company named ShotSpotter offers a service to cities of installing a large number of directionally-sensitive microphones at a large number of locations throughout a city, to recognize the signature sounds of gunfire, and triangulate to identify the precise time and place of the firing and immediately alert law enforcement. The system works really well.
Too well, because, well, too many of the the wrong kind of people get caught up in the police response to these alerts. If you don't believe me, then believe Chicago mayor William Ogden, who explicitly relied on that exact reason to justify the cancellation of the city's contract with ShotSpotter, which began removing its sensors a few weeks ago. Objectively, this is "bad governance". But to the people who voted for Ogden and -want- this outcome, it's "good governance", as in, sometimes the government is really good at accomplishing bad things.
The govt can and does print money, which becomes Free Money to those who get it. Which has been mostly Dems since FDR’s New Deal, who mostly support ever larger and less accountable govt. With most professors mostly wanting more redistribution of income rather than more wealth creation.
Reps before Trump paid lip service and a few actual policy proposals to reduce expenditures, but were always vilified as selfish and uncaring by the media, mostly Dems. And often losing elections.
Free Money is almost always very popular with those who receive it.
Only when Dems start claiming the govt is too big will it start being seriously reduced—which is most likely to happen when Reps in power give Free Money to Rep supporting orgs, and less to Dem supporting orgs. Unlikely to start happening too soon.
Governments cannot go out of business like poorly managed for-profit companies. The profit motive means that many businesses fail and cease to exist. Government does not get to cease to exist if it does a bad job.
“ If running an organization without limiting principles and never shutting down a unit were a good way to be effective, we would not observe millions of separate businesses. Instead, one big firm would manufacture everything, market everything, handle the distribution of everything, and provide every service.”
Sounds like an apt description of Lenin’s idea of the economy as a single factory,
We know how it ended (although the system can be very effective at some task, eg, winning a war of attrition),
I find it quite odd (I truly dont imply anything about you or your comment here) that people dont mention and in many cases I suspect dont even see the elephant in the room on this. The banking and finance paradigm that existed from the birth the USA and was then made manifest during the reign of the Jacksonians and then enforced with a broad based deep public sentiment that resembled a devout religion was certainly overturned in 1913, it was in fact mostly dismantled in the 1970s and then fully done away with by the late 1990s, it was ended with the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, in fact, centralized control of capital everywhere is essentially the heart of the Neoliberal project.
But thats a long conversation, the short of it is that we are badly governed because over the course of the 1970s and 1980s we transitioned to central planning.
The transition was long long before the 1970s and 1980s. Some people say the late 1800s, some the Civil War, some after the Panic of 1819. I say Hamilton baked it in right from the start. But it sure wasn't just 50 years ago.
Hmmm, the transition was long one but but it began far later than the earlier events you mentioned. After the Bank War of the 1830s we were spared, marking the transition point at 1913 is ok, but even there theres issues with conceptualizing it in the most of theways that I think are most important, it wasnt until 1935 that open market fusntions were taken from the regionals and given to the center, the ways I say most important is the funtioning of the eocnomy itself and the mainatance of economic federalism the system provided, I do the think the process began meaningfully after the war but ut was a multi decade buold up, the post war fed (after the 1930s changes had set in, but they should have chose one of the several other options instead of creating it in the first place) may have played a role in the consolidation of industry nationally and then their transformation into MNEs, but it wasnt until the radical changes of the 1970s (the world of stuff in and around ERISA, the de fact but effective near elimination of interstate banking inhibitors, the effective elimination of credit unions as what they had always been, the killing off of S&Ls, the 78 SC case that nullified state usury laws by allowing a firm any one state to legally project their home states regs into any other state, etc.) that paradigm that had always existed and the political and economic benefits that paradigm maintained, was shattered
“There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do. And almost never does government back out of an activity once it gets in.” The limitation on getting in is: the government program has to be one that can be sold to the public. But once it is in, the government needs only an active minority of supporters to continue in the activity indefinitely (the majority usually loses interest).
So far I haven't heard anyone mention competition. Government has none. Most government functions are monopolies that are funded by taxes or borrowed money. Businesses have to be lean and mean and provide a useful service or product because if they don't, their competitors will put them out of business. Poorly run businesses die while poor running government agencies grow.
I agree with both reasons for bad government, but do not think they are sufficient if only the seem to apply mainly to the executive. And even there the Legislature creates the incentives that bureaucrats responds to.
What are the main WAYS in whihc we are misgoverned?
Large deficits (≠ Σ(expenditures with NPV>0)
Inefficient incentives for reducing net CO2 emissions
Not enough high-value immigrants, inadequate selection of lower-value immigrants
Excessive and inefficient restriction of international trade and investment
Overly restrictive regulation of urban commercial and housing development.
We are badly governed compared to what? Scandinavian countries? How much better do you think we could be? 10%? 50%? How much worse? 10x? 50x?
I agree Congress and the Executive leadership is a circus. Despite this, I am amazed how well governed we are.
"There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do."
Federal, state, county, city, school district. These don't do different things?
"Then you win office, and you put those same people in positions of power. And guess what? They know nothing about ..."
Peter principle. I recently listened to a Freakenomics podcast about how this happens in the private sector. The best performer tends to be the one who gets promoted. According to the podcast they are less likely to do well. No better there.
If we expect governments to be inherently inefficient, but we will always have one, then a good government would be one that occupies the 'government slot' while not ever expanding.
One big reason for government failure not mentioned is that it not only undertakes to do more than it reasonably can, or that incentives are wrong, but that what it undertakes is not determined by any reasonable conception of what it should do, but rather by plain and simple grift. Spurious justifications are offered to support programs whose real purpose is social predation, not their ostensible goals. For example, lavish support on specious humanitarian ground of "homeless" encampments, actually open air drug markets, generates huge amounts of money for social service providers, who in turn support the politicians who implement it. Open borders similarly creates huge cash flow for for the social service providers, and similarly benefits the politicians and bureaucrats. The public is reluctant to believe just how corrupt and venal their government is, and so the obvious is ignored and discussions center on bafflement as to why government is failing, even as it is doing what the real beneficiaries, not the ostensible ones, want.
Grift is not the right way to describe the problem with giving contacts to these kinds of organizations. It's more like "systemic embezzlement" combined with a kickback scheme interfacing with the parallel economy of political favor exchange. There are thousands of people who are basically in the extended, shadow Plum Book list of positions to be filled with political appointees. If these organizations were inside the government it would look like the old spoils system, and placing them outside and awarding them contracts is the easy way to circumvent the measures intended to end the spoils system.
One specific case of a possibly egregious "Grift" is the Springfield, Ohio immigration situation. Research for yourself the name George Ten, and his businesses in Springfield.
One source, to start: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/375011/feds-and-state-ag-investigate-an-alleged-human-trafficking-empire-run-in-springfield-ohio/
another (Mayor Rob Rue of Springfield, Ohio also profits by renting to immigrants)
https://buckeyereporter.com/stories/664310242-special-report-renting-apartments-to-haitians-is-big-business-for-springfield-mayor-rob-rue-others
El Flamingo Club. Bora Bora Sports Bar. Las Margaritas Nightclub. El Cruzero Sports Bar. Los Escorpiones #2. Koko Bongo. El Rinconcito Nightclub. La Condesa. Los Escorpiones #5. The names of 9 bars - the news articles actually identified them as "brothels" disguised as "cantinas" - shut down by the state Alcohol and Beverage Commission last week in conjunction with a federal task force called the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance.
There's a lot of interest in this subect down here. It seems to be a lingering remnant of Protestant do-gooderism. If that goes away, I don't know that anyone would care about the cartels importing prostitutes from south of the border.
The other day when Nate Silver suggested that the only reason the Dems need lose the election is because of immigration, his commenters mostly did not glom on to that. They denied it was a problem, or else they denied that it was a problem for the Dems since they blamed Trump for Biden-Harris not solving it with the migrant-attractor quota plan and building lots of detention camps-of-saints on the border, which they thought everybody must see and agree about. Or they denied that it mattered to people. A number said it personally affected them not at all. Some said it was a way to deflect from the need for more redistribution by blaming a "few brown people".
Houston is my hometown. We used to joke that it sucked because it had no urban planning, no restraints on growth and thus allowance for the development of taste, and of course for its famous no-zoning that meant there were little quirks like a strip club a hundred feet from my high school to which the boys bragged about repairing, and half a dozen more along the nearest big cross-street that ran through the nearby neighborhoods.
Wow, we were naive, thinking our town "sucked" with little idea of the suckitude that awaited, which was ironic because it went hand-in-hand with the city finally starting in on *some* grown-up "beautification" measures and recreation-space efforts and so on, that in isolation - in the absence of mass immigration - would possibly, have actually led to people like me admitting, it's actually improving!
Now it's trying its damnedest to be a third-world city, without the "local", idiosyncratic charm of actual third world cities.
There was presumably a huge amount of dough spent on the operation to "rescue" those 84 unfortunate women, whatever "trafficking" means in this case. Who actually have now won the lottery as they will very likely all be permitted to remain by virtue of having been victims and being folded into the legal system as witnesses.
Were they the customers of this government service? Or the citizenry? As this exercise will in no way lead to change, it's hard to see how the citizenry much benefits. The cartel is set back a space on the game board. Or was the customer the large and "militarized" domestic law enforcement apparatus with, as AK points out, a permanent mission as long as the problem persists?
Because clearly there is no will to solve this particular problem. The solution is obvious and has been rejected by both political parties for decades, until the problem can't be named. We let in too many people. The problem wasn't "failure to vet" lol.
I can't "like" substack comments, something tech somewhere in the chain of connectivity, websearch shows that this is pretty common, so: 👍
Or maybe the customer is the Texas GOP, who never evinced any interest in reducing immigration until
Abbott took a seemingly personal and quixotic interest in it 2 or three years ago, perhaps because his own ambitions are limited.
We are “tough on crime” 😀. Vote for us.
It's most likely not productive to argue about the "right" definitions, but perhaps I can at least clarify by giving my understanding and usage of the terms.
A "grift" is like a fraudulent swindle performed by a con-artist (a kind of 'grifter') to fraudulently and dishonestly convince someone to hand over their money. In the non-political context these are most often single-encounters followed by permanent disengagement / disappearance.
In the political context the word is used to mean something along the lines of a "career strategy based on deceptive fundraising under pretense of a false persona and/or to support a noble purpose but in reality diverting as much of the proceeds to oneself as one can get away with." This is a kind of long-con that operates continuously and for indefinite iterations, not just a "sucker born every minute", but a well into which one can lower one's bucker over and over." A while back I wrote about the "carcinisation" of organizations under intense evolutionary pressure with each other to such up a limited amount of donation dollars, which selects for the kind of tactics and personalities that eventually turn the whole operation into nothing but a grift optimized to use political cover to separate fools from their money. There are few better examples than the SPLC.
Now, the various kinds of corrupt arrangements which involve contracting with the state or manipulating policy for the purpose of personal profit are different kinds of bad behavior which deserve different terminology because they require very different kinds of efforts to counter.
🦉 🙏 🫡
compared to what country and by what metric? neither are rhetorical questions. the federal government is a health insurance company with a military. everything else is a rounding error. the public wants from government:
- stable well paying jobs
- a generous social safety net for retirement
- low inflation
- minimal immigration while the public has a lot less children over many generations
if the government fails to deliver on any of those things, it makes people mad. now i don’t care how good a politician is, they aren’t magicians and they can’t magick away the reality of tradeoffs.
We are getting what we are allowing. Governmental power is derived from "we the people", and our shared duty to ensure their government serves the common good. It's on us, ultimately, and your description of the general public is, unfortunately, accurate.
There are some coordination problems involved.
Minimal immigration is in partial tension with well paying jobs as is low inflation if too low (like Bernanke-Yellen).
“There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do. And almost never does government back out of an activity once it gets in.“ Let’s not forget the progress that has been made on the right to carry and possess firearms in America. Or the decision by the Supreme Court to push abortion decisions over to the states. Or the freedom to inhale pot smoke. The Supreme Court has made better decisions these past four plus years.
“The Institute for Justice has won 10 U.S. Supreme Court cases. Collectively, these cases span all our litigation areas. Our victories have vindicated the right to earn an honest living, expanded educational opportunity for millions of children, defended free speech, and strengthened the Constitution’s protection for Americans’ property.”
Patience. We’re wearing the bastards down. Keep writing good Substack posts like this one and don’t forget to enjoy other aspects of life like Israeli folk dancing.
I have worked for several Fortune 100, highly profitable companies. It is still the case that in all of them, middle management was dominated by people who are "good at playing the game of status and power", with little benefit to actually delivering results.
I have experienced that myself. Humans are the same everywhere. But market competition does tend to act a bit like sandpaper, making the status games a little less rough among profit-seeking firms.
I like to note that the decay by mission bureaucratic creep that destroys the competency of government and non-profit institutions also impacts monopoly companies (ATT, IBM, etc of my youth) the same way and destroys the ability to be innovative. It appears an outcome of all "monopolies" who can't fail. Government, nonprofit, and monopolies bureaucratically evolve over time as the internal striver with their with political skills replace the innovators, nerds, and engineers like what happened to Boeing, Bechtel, NASA, March of Dimes (only seniors remember them), etc.
One has to distinguish between bad governance that is due to bad goals and bad governance that is do to bad performance at accomplishing goals. Performance-based bad governance is the government not being competent to do something the leadership actually wants it to do, like building a working, high quality Obamacare website on time. Arnold's reasons are decent explanations for why that happens. But bad-goals-based bad governance is an entirely different problem. Many people would say that a key attribute of "good governance" is a public environment that is very safe, secure, and orderly with low risk of crime. But obviously many people think that accomplishing that goal is "bad governance" if it means arresting too many of the wrong kind of people, and it better governance for the government to tolerate higher levels of crime and disorder than the alternative.
For example, is it good governance or bad governance to know when and where gunshots happen immediately after the weapons are fired, in order to being to quickly respond to incidents and successfully investigate gun crimes? Duh, it's obviously good governance. Fortunately a company named ShotSpotter offers a service to cities of installing a large number of directionally-sensitive microphones at a large number of locations throughout a city, to recognize the signature sounds of gunfire, and triangulate to identify the precise time and place of the firing and immediately alert law enforcement. The system works really well.
Too well, because, well, too many of the the wrong kind of people get caught up in the police response to these alerts. If you don't believe me, then believe Chicago mayor William Ogden, who explicitly relied on that exact reason to justify the cancellation of the city's contract with ShotSpotter, which began removing its sensors a few weeks ago. Objectively, this is "bad governance". But to the people who voted for Ogden and -want- this outcome, it's "good governance", as in, sometimes the government is really good at accomplishing bad things.
The govt can and does print money, which becomes Free Money to those who get it. Which has been mostly Dems since FDR’s New Deal, who mostly support ever larger and less accountable govt. With most professors mostly wanting more redistribution of income rather than more wealth creation.
Reps before Trump paid lip service and a few actual policy proposals to reduce expenditures, but were always vilified as selfish and uncaring by the media, mostly Dems. And often losing elections.
Free Money is almost always very popular with those who receive it.
Only when Dems start claiming the govt is too big will it start being seriously reduced—which is most likely to happen when Reps in power give Free Money to Rep supporting orgs, and less to Dem supporting orgs. Unlikely to start happening too soon.
Governments cannot go out of business like poorly managed for-profit companies. The profit motive means that many businesses fail and cease to exist. Government does not get to cease to exist if it does a bad job.
“ If running an organization without limiting principles and never shutting down a unit were a good way to be effective, we would not observe millions of separate businesses. Instead, one big firm would manufacture everything, market everything, handle the distribution of everything, and provide every service.”
Sounds like an apt description of Lenin’s idea of the economy as a single factory,
We know how it ended (although the system can be very effective at some task, eg, winning a war of attrition),
I find it quite odd (I truly dont imply anything about you or your comment here) that people dont mention and in many cases I suspect dont even see the elephant in the room on this. The banking and finance paradigm that existed from the birth the USA and was then made manifest during the reign of the Jacksonians and then enforced with a broad based deep public sentiment that resembled a devout religion was certainly overturned in 1913, it was in fact mostly dismantled in the 1970s and then fully done away with by the late 1990s, it was ended with the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, in fact, centralized control of capital everywhere is essentially the heart of the Neoliberal project.
But thats a long conversation, the short of it is that we are badly governed because over the course of the 1970s and 1980s we transitioned to central planning.
The transition was long long before the 1970s and 1980s. Some people say the late 1800s, some the Civil War, some after the Panic of 1819. I say Hamilton baked it in right from the start. But it sure wasn't just 50 years ago.
Hmmm, the transition was long one but but it began far later than the earlier events you mentioned. After the Bank War of the 1830s we were spared, marking the transition point at 1913 is ok, but even there theres issues with conceptualizing it in the most of theways that I think are most important, it wasnt until 1935 that open market fusntions were taken from the regionals and given to the center, the ways I say most important is the funtioning of the eocnomy itself and the mainatance of economic federalism the system provided, I do the think the process began meaningfully after the war but ut was a multi decade buold up, the post war fed (after the 1930s changes had set in, but they should have chose one of the several other options instead of creating it in the first place) may have played a role in the consolidation of industry nationally and then their transformation into MNEs, but it wasnt until the radical changes of the 1970s (the world of stuff in and around ERISA, the de fact but effective near elimination of interstate banking inhibitors, the effective elimination of credit unions as what they had always been, the killing off of S&Ls, the 78 SC case that nullified state usury laws by allowing a firm any one state to legally project their home states regs into any other state, etc.) that paradigm that had always existed and the political and economic benefits that paradigm maintained, was shattered
“There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do. And almost never does government back out of an activity once it gets in.” The limitation on getting in is: the government program has to be one that can be sold to the public. But once it is in, the government needs only an active minority of supporters to continue in the activity indefinitely (the majority usually loses interest).
So far I haven't heard anyone mention competition. Government has none. Most government functions are monopolies that are funded by taxes or borrowed money. Businesses have to be lean and mean and provide a useful service or product because if they don't, their competitors will put them out of business. Poorly run businesses die while poor running government agencies grow.
I agree with both reasons for bad government, but do not think they are sufficient if only the seem to apply mainly to the executive. And even there the Legislature creates the incentives that bureaucrats responds to.
What are the main WAYS in whihc we are misgoverned?
Large deficits (≠ Σ(expenditures with NPV>0)
Inefficient incentives for reducing net CO2 emissions
Not enough high-value immigrants, inadequate selection of lower-value immigrants
Excessive and inefficient restriction of international trade and investment
Overly restrictive regulation of urban commercial and housing development.
None of these are issues of mis-management.
We are badly governed compared to what? Scandinavian countries? How much better do you think we could be? 10%? 50%? How much worse? 10x? 50x?
I agree Congress and the Executive leadership is a circus. Despite this, I am amazed how well governed we are.
"There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do."
Federal, state, county, city, school district. These don't do different things?
"Then you win office, and you put those same people in positions of power. And guess what? They know nothing about ..."
Peter principle. I recently listened to a Freakenomics podcast about how this happens in the private sector. The best performer tends to be the one who gets promoted. According to the podcast they are less likely to do well. No better there.
If we expect governments to be inherently inefficient, but we will always have one, then a good government would be one that occupies the 'government slot' while not ever expanding.
Often they are not interested in “governing”, certainly not as pragmatists nor altruists. They have donors and activists to please.