We can trace the widespread notions in the Republican party that the government cannot ever do anything correctly, and should be feared when it tries, to this quote:

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. - Ronald Reagan

No no, don't believe in auditing, and ethics, and holding officials accountable with voting, and when necessary prosecutions. Just be scared of the government, and withhold funding so it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. But today's Republicans miss his message (he'd be considered a liberal today, I think)

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. From Reagan's inaugural address.

The Republican Party capitalizes on that perception but doesn't create it. America's governments are remarkably inept at doing even basic things. I just got back from Tokyo, where my 45 minute train ride from the airport arrived downtown within a minute of schedule. Meanwhile, the D.C. metro segment of my commute runs at best 20% over scheduled time. That's despite being one of the most expensive systems in the world. So many things are like that. We spend more on education than almost anyone else for worse results.

The Republican party actively recruits incompetency and actively sabotages the system. It's a blatantly racist, classist, anti-democracy party at this point. The voter disenfranchisement they engage in is widespread. The nutty conspiracy theories about voter fraud, all involving brown people, is widespread. It's become the party that's questioning democracy now that democracy means people like them aren't winning elections, so they have to engage in the craziest methods of gerrymandering, voter registration purging, barriers to voter registration, and actively dissemination of factually incorrect information.

<i>But when the time came to pay up for risk reduction in the Obamacare exchanges, Congress reneged and paid only 12% of what was owed to the insurers.</i> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/im-a-former-health-insuranc...

They pull shenanigans like this all the time.

The question to me is why is this the case? What makes American government particularly disfunctional and how can that be fixed? I don't really have any answers.

Totally escapes me too. I suspect deep-seated cultural differences. America is a more contentious, less cooperative society so we add layers of complexity to mediate between all these groups of people who can't agree on even basic things. In most European countries, for example, it's very difficult to block development projects through things like environmental review lawsuits. But there is also this basic level of trust that whoever is running the project won't build a chemical refinery next to an elementary school. Nobody has that trust in the U.S.

The real question is not why the US seems to lag behind it's peers in how effective our government is. It is, how is the US able to be so much better than it's peers?

You can't compare little state sized homogenous countries in Europe to the enormous, diverse landscape of the US. Compare the US to any other country of similar population and you will see a performance standout in almost all categories.

Cherry picking European countries and comparing them to the US is like asking why Vermont, Massachusets, Connecticut, or New York are so much better off than Europe.

I'm talking about countries like the France and Germany, etc. The U.S. continues to outperform those countries but I'm not sure you can chalk it up to the effectiveness of our government. I'd chalk it up to the U.S. having a head start from WWII and the major European powers being late to adopt market economies. Since then, they've caught up. For example, the U.S. had 50% higher labor productivity per hour of work than France and Germany in the 1970s. Today, it's identical: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in....

But again, both countries have less than a third of the US population. And no, I don't think our government gives us any special advantage. But my point is that you can't begin to compare the US to these fractionally sized countries that have the advantage of chasing off all the poor into other cheaper countries in Europe due to high cost of living.

Why are Bel-Air and Manhatten so rich? They are just doing so much better than the rest of the US. They barely have any poor! Must be their local governments and better market economies!

The middle class, and rural America have a unique mix of deep ignorance of reality, and a legitimate complaint. Legit: they have been screwed economically, the rich have by every single measure gotten astronomically more wealthy, and the middle class has at best stagnated but also has shrunk.

Deep ignorance and denial how flawed their culture is. They believe their taxes go disproportionately to cities, and the poor, and that illegal immigrants get free health care who they also subsidize. They believe gays, gay marriage, women, and non-Christians are not equal to straight white men. And they HATE that they are forced by courts and laws to treat them as equal.

They've become skeptical of democracy because it's not working in their favor. When courts were siding with them on religion in schools and part of the public discourse, meaning they get to metaphorically slap minority gays and women around, it was great for them. But as they're on the losing end of these civil rights cases, they're not liking it.

Neither the economics, nor democracy are working for them. So they're attacking the entire system, and Republican politicians are really taking advantage of that in a variation of the Nixon southern strategy:

https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...

Rural folk don't seem to understand that 100 miles of distributed water and sewage, shared by not that many people, will cost a lot to maintain. Yet they get pissed that city folk are paying less for water and sewer, totally not understanding the concept of economies of scale. They have no idea that rural telephones have been subsidized by city folk for upwards of 100 years to make hundreds of miles of copper more affordable, basically neutralizing the fact they live in the boonies.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jun/19/americas-grea...

I get all that and I agree with a lot of it. But that doesn't really explain, for example, why building a subway in NYC costs 7x per km what it costs in London or Paris.

http://www.amny.com/transit/subway-construction-in-nyc-costs...

America has taken local power to an extreme. There is just no pre-emption or exception to that local power which includes numerous fiefdoms within the county, the city, the utilities, a massive complex of competing federal, state, and city regulations. And then unions. To this day, if you do a trade show in Javits and take a computer power cord and plug it into a power strip, let alone BRING YOUR OWN power strip, you will get chewed out. A worker who sees it will chew you out, tell his buddy who will chew you out, tell his boss, and he his boss, and in sequence you will have a minimum of an hour of swearing, vitriol over how you're intentionally trying to fuck them over, cost them money, take their jobs, on and on. It is one of the worst union cities I've ever experienced.

Instead of protecting a right to work concept, they protect specific tasks. So even if that task becomes obsolete, you still have to pay that union guy with that specialty to stand around doing nothing.

If it weren't for all the people you'd disenfranchise from such a process, what you'd want is a business, neighborhood, city, state delegation to create a federal law that totally preempts all state and local laws, for each major project, to cut through the red tape. shrug

Oh and middle men. There's a middle man for everything. Especially in Manhattan, it's almost not hyperbole to say the doorman has an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. And anybody making more money than a doorman, has two or more of each of those.

Great city. And a shit hole.

EDIT: Also, I think the 2nd Ave project is a big fat classist waste of money. The Lexington Ave/Park Ave line is not that far away, Manhattan has already a very dense subway service compared to Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.

Kind of an aside, but the need for the 2nd Ave Subway isn't so much about having to walk a couple of blocks but that the 456 line has too many riders which leads to overcrowding and delays.

The DC Metro is subject to malicious interference from a certain political party that LIKES it to be unpunctual and troubled. Gives them something to bash

The D.C. Metro is funded and controlled by D.C. and various MD and VA counties that are overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats.

That perception is _much_ older than Reagan. Back in 1866 we have:

> No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

(Gideon Tucker), and it was hardly a brand-new notion then. The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first. To the extent that this matches up with the needs and desires of the people it's governing, things are good. To the extent that it doesn't, you get problems. Democracy helps a bit with making things align, but not terribly much. And the more non-local a government is, the less alignment of its needs and desires with the diverse needs and desires of the governed, all else being equal.

This last is why some people advocate for more local government power and less central government power...

No doubt cynicism is as old as politics. But there is a difference when a wag says "don't trust the government" and when the newly elected President of the US says it.

There are legitimate debates to be had about the size and function of the government. But I've never understood the populist appeal of the declaration: The government only causes problems -- elect me and let me prove it to you!

I agree that there is a difference.

But I suspect that a number of elected presidents of the US in the 1800s, and a number of the people involved in setting up the US government in the 1700s, would have said to not trust the US federal government in its current form. In fact, they would have been appalled by it.

Now times have changed since the 1800s, and we can indeed have debates about whether the government we have now is doing the things it should be doing, to the extent that it should be doing them. I wish such debates were more common, instead of everyone presupposing the answers. :(

>No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

That's obscure and it's also being taken out of context [1]. What I said, was "widespread notion in the Republican party" I do mean contemporary, this is not an exhaustive search or maybe I'd go back to the Magna Carte.

>The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first.

Really, it's a fact? You have a citation for this fact? I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?

Anyway the small government advocacy pretty much amounts to whining for being on the losing end of the stick by people with failed ideas or failed representation. And the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails: being selectively non-democratic. Top on that list I'd but ethnic discrimination (racism) and misogyny. Anywhere those are protected, democracy is under threat.

The Articles of Confederation prescribed such a weak central government, that it was pointless and a failure, and thus scraped in favor of the current one.

The current constitution, prescribes a more powerful central government, but also incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy. Upons that compromise coming under threat, the "state's rights" types came back out of the woodwork, and then ~650,000 people died. See Yugoslavia for another example of democracy + racism = not really a democracy now, is it?

This local advocacy continued on in the U.S. with things like local school boards emphasizing and deemphasizing pesky things called facts, in order to avoid troubling local sensitivities, and ensuring a nation can have different ideas about how history and science have transpired.

Kansas, a real life experiment in less central government and more local government. Total failure. Only governor Christ Christie is less popular than Brownback.

[1] Gideon was criticizing the lawyer for not realizing the law had changed. It is a quote of a quote. What Gideon wrote was: The error arose from want of diligent watchfulness in respect to legislative changes. He did not remember that it might be necessary to look at the statutes of the year before. Perhaps he had forgotten the saying, that “no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”

Oh, and as far as misalignment of government and citizens' desires in democracies...

You may want to read "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott, or https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ for an illustrative review if you don't want to read the whole book. Some of the examples in the book are from totalitarian regimes, but Brazil is a democracy and still ended up with some of the same failure modes, and the blog post gives a hypothetical but oft-repeated in practice example of a less-local (city-wide or larger) government trampling all over people from a particular part of the city, all with the best of intentions, because it thinks (possibly correctly!) that it can't accomplish those intentions without making its job easier by destroying the local communities.

Democratic government does help avoid excesses like mass deaths due to obtuse state action, of course, and this is a pretty darned good endorsement given the history of the 20th century. But it certainly doesn't eliminate obtuse state action.

"The current constitution... incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy."

You do know that the anti-slavery advocates were the source of the 3/5ths compromise, right? Anti-slavery groups didn't want slaves to count at all for determining representation, while pro-slavery groups wanted slaves fully counted. If the 3/5ths compromise institutionalized racism in the Constitution, it was to 'appease' the anti-slavery advocates. Since you appear to misunderstand this, perhaps you should ask yourself what other facts you misunderstand.

> I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about.

For direct democracies with significant electoral control over what goes on, sure. For the thing that most "democratic" countries have, I disagree.

> Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?

"Government" as understood in modern Western "democracies" is a combination of the bureaucracy and a certain number of elected officials.

You really haven't heard of elected officials putting their elected desires ahead of their nominal constituents'?

For the rest, as far as I can tell the main business of governing is in fact done by the bureaucracy in most Western countries, and bureaucratic departments tend to prioritize achievement of the goals they were set (often by themselves), without regard to how others would prioritize those goals. This is neither unheard of, unexpected, nor unusual. Everyone I've met who has thought about the problem at all, regardless of political persuasion, understands that this is a fundamental hazard of bureaucracy that needs to be addressed somehow. There are strong disagreements on how best to address it, of course.

> the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails

I think we agree on when and why it fails. The question is when it stops being democratic and along what dimensions.

For example, I consider the various statewide legislation passed recently in some states that forbids democratically-voted-for municipal wifi to be a failure of democracy in precisely the way you describe, and one that would be avoided by more-local devolution of power.

Now the problems you mention with discrimination are very real, and I have no problem with strongly centralized civil rights protections that are therefore uniformly applied to all citizens regardless of jurisdiction. There are certainly various other issues like this, where either there are significant externalities or a historical failure of local governance that ought to be the purview of more central government bodies.

This need for case-by-case analysis does mean that there are no easy solutions here, and I'm not claiming that there are. But I _am_ claiming that due to repeated failures in the current system, whether they were avoidable or not, there is fairly widespread perception that the central government is not to be trusted. And I don't think this perception really "dates back to Reagan" so much as that Reagan _expressed_ this rising perception. That is, Reagan was a consequence of the perception, not a cause of it.