HN occasionally has articles about education and the comparison of, say, Finnish education and American education comes up. I am firmly of the opinions that Finnish education works, when it works, because it is a service that the population is providing for themselves via government. It is seen as spending their own money on themselves. These other social services are seen similarly: people are getting what they paid for. And they (Finns, in this example) are conscious of it: in large part, I lay this lingering national consciousness of the value of government at the Karelian refugee resettlement of the 1940s. My inner armchair historian/anthropologist sees this massive national effort from family level through the top of government as providing a bit of national glue that also led to feelings of agency and efficacy among the population.
The sense that government takes our money and gives it to someone else, or steals it, pervades the US discourse. Our efforts are focused on avoiding taxes, lessening taxes, eliminating services for those undeserving others. We don't want to pay for other peoples' kids; they shouldn't have had them and haven't they heard of birth control, which they should also be able to obtain on their own. Personal responsibility is king. It subtly pervades even how we teach reading -- if you read [1], you see that teachers were taught that kids learn from their parents reading to them, and it's also just a matter of parenting choices and personal responsibility. From the family to top levels of government in the US, there's now an anti-glue, the story that government is an adversary, that it's a wasteful theft of honest peoples' money.
They are both just stories that make themselves true through our behavior, the behavior of government officials, citizens, and contractors.
[1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-a...
Even that is sanitizing it, it predates the Civil War and is inextricable from the cause of the Confederacy in the Civil War, perhaps best articulated in Confederate Vice President Stephens famous Cornerstone speech:
---[quote]---
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.”
---[end quote]---
There's no inherent reason something like healthcare or net neutrality needs to be done nationally.
Edit: After looking into it PISA stats, this is inaccurate. Must have heard this in a news story.
Edit 2: They do seem to do better than us with diversity - http://www.compareyourcountry.org/pisa/country/fin - but worse than OECD average.
If something else was going on, then taxes would be voluntary...
If my political faction ran the country like a dictatorship, I wouldn't mind them taking my money, because they'd spend it on getting me what I want (which may include "a better world," prioritized according to my subjective view of which world problems are the worst). However because there is more than one political faction in power, the money taken from me will sometimes be spent on things I don't want, including things that I am actually opposed to. Clearly the solution is either cough "greater unity," or the more practical answer which is having minimal taxes to fund only the lowest common denominator of services that everyone wants.
What? If people really felt that way there would be no need for taxes.
If you have a lack of self-interest (or the sense of "self" is altered to refer to the group) you would freely give money to each other.
The only time taxes are required is when people will not freely give money for a project. That is literally the only reason taxes exist. Nothing is stopping people from donating to the government.
In fact, I was just thinking the other day that 50 million trump voters could donate $100 each to "build the wall" and be done with it. You could probably even donate $25/year for four years. $5 billion is nothing at those scales yet there is all this bickering (supposedly) about it.
If me and 10,000 people want a waste treatment plant we can individually chip in. But, in that case defecting would be so common that it's unlikely to be built. Or, we can vote to make payment mandatory and get what most people want, but nobody wants to pay for.
Now, if you disagree feel free to start a build a wall fund. It can work for specific kinds of things where donations feel good.
Ok, but my point is limited to the fact that taxes only serve a purpose when people will not voluntarily fund a project. So this agrees with me.
It delusional to think taxes are something more than a government taking your money and spending it on stuff (which may or may not benefit you).
>"Now, if you disagree feel free to start a build a wall fund. It can work for specific kinds of things where donations feel good."
I could personally care less whether there is a wall or not. It seems irrelevant beyond as a symbol that immigration laws are being enforced.
My 100$ is not going to cure cancer so I don’t donate to cancer research. But, if I knew it would make the difference between a cure and no cure, then I would very much donate 100$ to end cancer.
So you claim people won't voluntarily fund a project like a wastewater treatment plant since it doesn't make them feel rewarded or some other mental thing. Fine, doesn't matter why they won't do it. My point is that's the only time taxes are required to get a project done.
>"My 100$ is not going to cure cancer so I don’t donate to cancer research. But, if I knew it would make the difference between a cure and no cure, then I would very much donate 100$ to end cancer."
Even the NIH admits medical researchers waste 90% of the funds they pass out (I would put it much higher), so yea there really is no reason to give them any more money: https://nihrecord.nih.gov/newsletters/2016/07_01_2016/story3...
As to efficiency that’s not really relevant. What I pay to see a movie is divorced from what it takes to make the movie. All I care about is the utility.
But, individual roads fit into a larger context. If you want to get from A to B and there is a road from A to C and from C to B then the utility is limited to time saved. Companies rarely build such roads and it’s even rarer to see them turned into public toll roads.
The US interstate highway system for example provides minimal individual benefit over existing roads, but massive collective benefit. Worldwide you don’t see companies building such things even when the demand is there.
Why would companies be building roads like that when there is no need to do it?
>"Worldwide you don’t see companies building such things even when the demand is there."
This would be interesting to look at, where is there demand for roads?
Need is a poor way of looking at investments. Having a more direct route reduces travel costs. Which is while people use Toll Road‘s even when their are generally other options.
If you want to make the suggestion that companies will make toll roads you need to explain why the don’t even when their are many profitable bridges etc. Toll bridges could be profitable in many places yet they are not built largely becase the cost is so extreme.
As a result, people are not willing to pay much for more roads, so they aren't going to be built. It may not even be legally possible in many cases under current regulations.
I like this point and I make it a lot to my Democrat friends who insist rich people should pay more taxes. These people use the fact that they are themselves rich to support their argument ("I should pay more taxes too, you see!"). I always ask them, "Then why don't you? The Treasury accepts donations, you know."
It would be a persuasive gesture for folks like Bill Gates and Bernie Sanders who are insisting their tax bracket should be higher to write big checks to the Treasury for what they think is morally right.
But of course, they won't. Nor should they -- top charities deliver much higher societal ROI than government, in my opinion. And apparently Gates et al. agree with me privately. Publicly... they are all for higher taxes as long as it's forced by threat of imprisonment, apparently.
The issues that proponents intend to address with greater taxation on the wealthy have remarkably little to do with "the government doesn't have enough money". They have to do with "taxes form economic incentives and the current set of incentives suck for everybody". An individual--yes, including Bill Gates--paying more taxes has marginal impact on the systemic issues of high-end under-taxation. Had the phrase not been co-opted by dirtbags, we'd probably file the act you are asking your "Democrat friends" about under...wait for it...virtue signaling.
Longer term, having the rich pay little taxes destabilizes the nation. Democratic rule is not perticularly stable over time and the US is heading down a very dark path.
In the end their are not enough billionaires where revenue from them really matters. Higher taxes on competent wealthy people has little real impact. However, ultra low capital gains is crital for creating a group of people who are incompetent, inherited lots of money, and stay powerful.
This really sounds true, but it disregards game theory. For concreteness, let's say the government proposes to upgrade a waste processing plant for $500 million, and you think it's a pretty good idea. There are varying levels of being willing to "freely give money":
1. You are willing to personally pay for the waste processing plant out of your own pocket. You happen to have $500 million, and regardless of what anyone else in the country thinks, you think the waste processing upgrade is badly needed and you're willing to devote your entire personal fortune to it. Maybe the waste processing plant will be named after you.
2. You are willing to pay for it, but only if your fellow citizens also pitch in. The waste processing plant serves 5 million people in the area. You aren't willing to personally pay $500 million, but you are willing to enter a contract with your 5 million fellows that you'll all pay $100 each.
3. You would be willing to join a pact to pay for it, but not if you can easily get away with being a free rider, where the plant gets built without your support. If a generous billionaire will personally donate to the government to pay for the entire thing, then why should you pay anything? Or, if 1 million of your fellow citizens will happily pay $500 each, then why should you pay anything? But that's not to say you don't think the plant is worth the money. You'd even be willing to pay for it if there were no other way to get it built. You'd just prefer not to waste your own money on it if the plant gets built even when you opt out of the payment contract.
Unfortunately, the common mentality of option (3) usually prevents options (1) and (2) from being feasible, because anyone who doesn't agree to pay still gets the benefit of the plant upgrades. Option (1) can still work for very prestigious projects that make a good legacy-building donation, but probably not waste processing plant upgrades. The free rider problem prevents almost anyone from voluntarily forming a pact to share the cost burden even when the plant upgrades are direly needed.
Fortunately there is a fourth option.
4. You would be willing to pay for it conditional on your fellow citizens fairly sharing the bill. Thus you support entering a mutually-binding pact which will also bind any potential free riders in the municipality who also benefit from the waste processing plant. The pact takes force as long as the motion to upgrade the waste processing plant wins majority support. In order for this kind of pact to be possible, you all (even the free riders) voluntarily agree ahead of time to support the legally-binding force of these kinds of pacts, and the conditions under which the majority will be determined. In other words, you choose to live under a democratic government.
Of course there's also a fifth option:
5. You don't think the waste processing plant needs upgrades, and you don't support yourself or anyone else paying for it.
I often hear from Americans that taxation equates to theft, or slavery, or being held at gunpoint to pay for other peoples' things. But this naively assumes that anyone who doesn't have opinion (1) must have opinion (5). In fact, I think the vast majority of people have opinion (4), because it's the Nash equilibrium for people who support a public works project, but I never hear opponents of taxation even talk about the existence of opinion (4).
Perhaps they haven't imagined that someone would be unwilling to donate $100 to the government, but be enthusiastically willing to have that same $100 forcibly taken from them (as long as it's also taken from their fellows)? I certainly am. That's why I vote to raise taxes even though I wouldn't donate to the government.
That's what taxes are. They're not there to coerce payment from people who aren't willing to donate. They exist to coordinate payments from a bunch of people who want to get things done but don't want to be the only sucker left with the bill. That's the whole point. And we get our schools and water treatment and garbage pickup and nobody has to make personal donations to the government to make it happen. We won't get our treatment plant any other way.
How do people get together to invest in anything in this world you describe? How do you get 100 people to invest in your real estate venture without defecting on each other?
Sorry, but I don't see it. It seems like a solved "problem", even when there is no desire guaranteed to be fulfilled at the end.
For projects like waste treatment plants, it's very hard or impossible to ensure that only the "investors" (ie, people who volunteered to fund it) get the benefit. If the waste gets treated, the tapwater is safe to drink, that weird smell in the streets goes away, the coliform count goes down, the beaches are open for swimming in the summer, and fewer people get sick. That's wonderful but how do we limit the benefits to the shareholders of the waste treatment plant, so as to convince people to invest in it?
The investors don't care if there are free riders as long as they get the expected benefits. The neighboring property values may rise, for example.
>"That's wonderful but how do we limit the benefits to the shareholders of the waste treatment plant, so as to convince people to invest in it?"
I just can't get past this. This is just not something I consider in any way when choosing to make an investment/donation. I simply do not care if other people may benefit, that is not my concern.
I mean lets take a smaller task:
Say I feel like doing the dishes so I can have a clean plate later in the day. Once I get going with doing dishes, its not a hassle to finish them.
Should I be upset if someone else uses one of the dishes I cleaned? Should I not do the dishes, even if I want to, because eventually someone else may do them? If it was likely for someone else to take care of it, why hasn't it already been done?
The investors aren't particularly concerned about small positive externalities such as the increase in surrounding property values. (If the positive externalities are very large, they would probably attempt to capture them somehow -- such as buying up the whole neighbourhood before proceeding with the development. This is why profitable train companies in Asia build train lines to where they own the land, and develop the area around their stations into shopping malls and residential complexes).
That's very different than having free riders. If you give your investors the option of paying $100 per share, or $0 per share, and in either case they'll get the same number of shares, then you suddenly won't find any investors willing to pay. Even if it's a profitable endeavour at $100 per share!
Why would you be offering such a strange deal to your investors? Well, you wouldn't, because it would totally undermine your ability to get your project funded. But it's exactly the model you're proposing when you suggest that private citizens might donate to the government if they really want public infrastructure to get funded! The ones who don't donate are paying $0/share, and the ones who do are paying $100/share, and they all get equal use of the infrastructure.
The free rider problem is not when you try to get investors to buy into your project, even though a few people who don't buy in will also benefit slightly. It's when you try to get investors to buy into your project, even though anybody who doesn't buy in benefits just as much.
Having said this, now let me put it in the context of your quote:
> "This is just not something I consider in any way when choosing to make an investment"
When you consider purchasing shares of a company for $100/share, do you not consider in any way the possibility that these shares might be available for a lower price from another seller? I would expect you would do research and pay the lowest price that is on offer. And if someone is offering them for $0/share, wouldn't you consider that when deciding whether or not to pay $100?
edit: Let me bring this back to the example. How are you going to pitch investors to pay to upgrade a water treatment plant, when they'll reap exactly the same gains from it as their neighbours who didn't contribute a dime? Or, after attempting this and failing to raise any funds whatsoever, let alone the required $500 million, how might you alter your fundraising strategy to make it more successful?
To simplify, let's assume that every one of the 5 million citizens has equal wealth, and the identical preferences, and is willing contribute up to at most $200 for this project, but prefers to pay the minimum possible amount and will always opt to pay $0 if the treatment plant gets built regardless.
Why do people donate nearly a billion dollars per year to American Heart Association (https://www.forbes.com/companies/american-heart-association/...) even though I won't, but I could still get the same benefit for free? Because my benefit is irrelevant to their decision...
The only time it makes sense to care about someone else benefiting for free is if it means you are benefiting less for the same price. This concern about free riders is irrational.
>"And if someone is offering them for $0/share, wouldn't you consider that when deciding whether or not to pay $100?"
I'd take the free shares and then go ahead with the purchase for $100/share as well. Edit: Actually, best thing to do is take the free shares, then dump them on the market. Then use the original funds to buy more shares at a lower price.
>"How are you going to pitch investors to pay to upgrade a water treatment plant, when they'll reap exactly the same gains from it as their neighbours who didn't contribute a dime?"
Explain the benefits of the plant, telling them to see if they can get any of the neighbors to contribute too so it will be cheaper for them (nb: the price per person becomes more favorable, not the benefits). And anyway, you can always charge people for the water later so this example is not even very good...
Even if I don't get that money directly, I benefit massively because fire brigades prevent fires from burning down entire neighborhoods, health insurance keeps the work force healthy, unemployment programs keep crime rates low and provide training, free education attracts profitable industries etc.
I don't need to have a child to benefit from free education, and I don't need to be unemployed to benefit from unemployment programs. I'm very much spending all that tax money on myself.
This sounds great, but if everyone was in favor of it there would be no reason to make this payment mandatory.
Note how even denying non-payers all public services doesn't work. If you don't pay for the fire brigade but your neighbor does you profit (since a fire in his house is less likely to go out of control and jump over to your house). The resulting situation would be less fair than just forcing everyone to pay for firefighting services.
On the other hand, when spending other people's money on myself, for example lunches for business travel, I am incredibly cost conscious. I've skipped dinner a couple times because I felt the airport meals were too expensive. (The same was true when I was a child and spending my parents' money.)
Clearly they should put me in charge of governement budgets.
But I think it makes sense in general. If I were to buy something with someone else's money for someone else, I honestly wouldn't care too much about either the cost or the gift, I'd get the thing that seemed reasonable to both parties. For example, if I bought gift for someone who performed a service for my company, using my company's money, I would not be very cost conscious, and I'd only put minimal effort in (after all, it's just a task I need to complete). I don't want to be stingy (we want the person to like us), but I also don't want to get flak from accounting.
I am not going to spend in excess, but if a company is paying for me to fly somewhere, I doubt a $30 airport meal is going to break them.
Now there have been times on site with a client, and I had a $120 per diem, where I might eat breakfast and lunch from a vending machine so that I can have a nice dinner, but I would never skip a meal at an airport if I had enough money left for it, and even if I didn't, I'd still charge the company and hope it flies under the radar.
Again $30 isn't going to bankrupt any company that can afford to fly you around.
I was thinking of a reimbursement policy where there is no per diem, and they'll reimburse all meals and alcohol "within reason" (meaning so long as you indulge less than the VPs), but I just thought about it, and if I had a per diem I would also keep costs low. When others are paying, and you keep costs low, it's kind of signaling that you value them paying enough that you are willing to do the job of picking the most efficient resource allocation, just like they would do for themselves. I think of it as showing goodwill and that you are on the same side. I was raised in a business culture that is more relationship oriented than the US.
I too have been frugal with an expense account, but that may have been more out of a general mistrust of the employer, who might not reimburse in a timely and convenient fashion, rather than out of concern for their financial well-being. If my brother-in-law were to offer my entire family dinner, on him, at a restaurant of our choice, we would be eating at a strip-mall taqueria, for less than at McDonald's; whereas if my parents are buying, it's gonna be sushi, with a bunch of the fancy rolls. I know what they can each afford. Also, when I am shopping, I take it personal when I feel like I am getting ripped off, even if I am buying on behalf of someone else. If buying is a game, I want to win it.
For instance, I am super pissed about the F-35. I don't fly it, build it, maintain it, develop for it, see it, or even hear it. But it seems like maybe the government spent at least 5 times as much on it as it should have. Same with Boston's Big Dig. I don't live there or drive through it, but we all got ripped off on that one. That deal where Chicago sold its public parking meters and the Skyway Bridge? Pissed. People who don't care about other people's money when they spend it should not be allowed to spend other people's money. But there is way too much money that needs to be spent, and not enough conscientious spenders to do all of it. Thus, we end up with the yahoos that allow other people to be ripped off.
It’s a cute quip, but if you presented the opposite political viewpoint with an equally cute quip from a liberal, these Friedman acolytes would be the first to yell at you about “anecdotes vs evidence.”
I personally think that all forms of this style of comment are lowbrow-highbrow, contribute nothing but a sense of self-satisfaction to the poster, and should be voted down.
All in all, it's IMO a very undifferentiated, ultra-libertarian point of view that Friedman's quote is displaying. I'd rather have somewhat inefficient government services than private monopolies, wherever market forces are not strong enough to create good competition. That applies to things like health care, the electrical grid, drinking water and a reasonable social safety net.
If I buy a birthday present for someone, I care very much about the content of the present.
I believe in MF quote "someone" is better described as "someone you do not personally know or maybe see once". A model for that is buying a gift for a Yankee Swap party. Or for a child I do not know: something to cheer them up, but as I do not know if (s)he likes dolls or trucks I can go with a safe, generic choice, e.g., a book.
That is, I am still trying to do a good thing, but am not too worried that I will guess incorrectly.
This is because if the receiver can afford it and thought it was good, he would already have it. Because he doesn't, getting it as a gift is worse than getting money.
Alternative economic interpretation: if you gave someone the choice between item X and money worth X, the gift is good only if the recipient would choose item. If they were to choose the money, then they are always short-changed.
Gifting is economically inefficient.
> This is because if the receiver can afford it and thought it was good, he would already have it.
Assuming they a) know about it and its qualities, b) know how to get it, c) can do so without hassle, and d) truly know what they want and need.
Then there are people who hate to choose, but trust certain others to make a good choice for them.
When you buy something for you, you know your exact needs and how to evaluate compromises. For gifts you care, but not as much since you lack significant information. You get something that is "good enough". For close friends you'll land a great gift in value and cost, but when you don't know the person very much, the gift usually tends to become an Amazon gift card or the like, since any guess may be a poor choice.
For example, many years ago I bought a projector with all the money I had saved (still student, at my parents), and I projected films on the wall, which was suboptimal but I was fine with that. On my birthday my friends got a sliding screen to hang from the ceiling! And I thank them very much for it! But even if they took the measures and all while visiting me, they missed the fact that the ceiling was ultra light drywall, rendering the gift useless.
This is one of the premises underlying rational choice theory that doesn't hold up to empirical investigation.
In the private sector there are plenty of cases where you're spending someone else's money on someone else and you care about doing a good job of it—and often without the requirement of personal mores as motivation. Banks and investment managers, for instance, basically do this. Some of course are awful, but some (loosely correlated with the ones who have been around for a while and built a reputation) actually do care about getting good results without excessive risk and without deception. Do the people who agree with Friedman's statement about government also conclude that private banks are bad too and people need to look out for their own money?
;)
When buying for someone else, my biggest concern is to not look cheap. When buying for myself, my biggest concern is getting the best value. When using someone else's money, I'd be less cost conscious because I'm not feeling the hit.
I definitely care about what I give someone, but I care about different things than when buying for myself. You can see this in politics. Politicians have the best benefits in government, and when they pass a bill, they want to significantly affect the most people, even if the impact isn't as good as a better thought out system. Case in point: the ACA impacts most Americans, but prices for medical care overall have gone up. For those 87%, it sure seems like a good deal because they don't see the true cost (lots of deficit spending and worse care than a single payer system).
That kind of emotionality is what keeps people from making reasonable decisions on economic policy. It would be nice if the kind of naive Keynesianism that politicians love to apply actually worked. It would be nice if you could spend yourself out of a recession. Unfortunately, politicians only like the spending part of the equation, not the savings part.
It's important to note that the Chicago school does build on Keynesian insights. It's an attempt at improving upon its failures.
I suspect that the truth of the matter is that conscientiousness varies across the human population and that the best analysis takes into account this fact.
To ignore rational self interest is naive and plainly wrong- but it is also wrong to ignore the impact of high conscientiousness on decision-making. I say this without condoning or condemning either configuration.
The problem with these economicist "stories," as they call them, is that people (including economists themselves) believe them too much.
Once stories like this are embedded in the way we think, we constantly see ways of interpreting the world in a reinforcing way. Every case of inefficiency is found to be an example of principal-agent problems.
Not specifically a Friedman problem or a laissez-faire problem.
I definitely agree. The public reaction to how "someone else's money is spent on someone else" is sometimes very passionate.
e.g. feelings about government funding for the proposed border wall, support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, Planned Parenthood, prisons, police military-grade weaponry, etc
At the very least, in cases where value systems and ethical considerations come into play, people are extremely concerned about how government spends other people's money on other people.
Furthermore, people have efficiency concerns: plenty of people in big cities like Los Angeles are very concerned about the way the city spends its money in general, given the state of the roads and streets, levels of crime and traffic, mediocre education, etc
>delivers the least
2. most major advancements in tech and healthcare are due to the military. Silicon Valley was built on military spending. Self driving cars were initially funded by DARPA. AI was funded by military. If you have a job in the tech industry you can thank the US military
There's also the minor detail of the US navy making global trade possible and the strength of the US military making traditional war pointless which has resulted in the last few decades being the most peaceful in human history in terms of probability of dying in combat
Can you back that up? That military spending has been high gives no guarantee that having spent the same money in the private sector wouldn't have led to even better results and advancements.
The military spends on R&D where it makes zero business sense for a for-profit company to spend. Private companies must be profitable.
gov't-funded R&D is why we have nice things. everyone strategically forgets that silicon valley exists because of bottomless cold war spending, so silicon valley's obsession with the superiority of the private sector is ever ironic
The private sector is generally very, very heavy on short-termism. Even when companies do have internal long-term research initiatives, there is often a strong aversion to pursuing research that could cannibalize high-margin products.
Which private, for profit, company would spend five (5) billion dollars (unadjusted for inflation) to launch GPS satellites into space and then allow their unlimited use free of cost to anyone in the world who has a receiver? That cost doesn't even account for ongoing maintenance.
And there is nothing free about using those satellites. Tax payers pay for their launch and subsequent maintenance and running costs.
Social security is efficient because it doesn't have this problem.
However you really shouldn't be using them that way since there are far better uses for the value.
What about the F-35?
This is the same tortured logic that leads to cost-cutting with regards to IT security expenditures.
I wouldn't call it "not delivering".
I would call that a total failure by any possible interpretation.
Also, did I understand you correctly: you not only want to cut american military spending, but also keep US morally responsible for situation in Ukraine?... Now, both these viewpoints are to some extent reasonable, if they come from corresponding first principles. But I can't possibly imagine how the same person can hold these two views at the same time: they completely contradict each other. Either US is responsible for events across the globe, OR it shouldn't have a huge military - how on Earth can you believe both?!
And now we have Myanmar muslim situation and Yemen where people are begging for US intervention, but in all probability if we intervened we would be getting criticized for it by the same people asking us to intervene in a few years
We also certainly intervened in Ukraine by fomenting a coup there. Rolling tanks there would probably be WW-3.
None of these interventions has made life better for anyone other than the evil ding dongs at Brookings and in the Pentagon.
African World War (1998-2003). Five million people killed. With nine countries fighting, I think that it qualifies perfectly as a world war.
Bingo, and that's from the Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard actively patrolling GLOBAL waters.
Maritime piracy alone is a considerable economic threat, yes in the 21st century. An estimated 2 BILLION dollars a year is spent on naval operations just off the coast of Somalia (PDF WARNING - PDF WARNING - PDF WARNING http://www.ics-shipping.org/docs/default-source/Piracy-Docs/... )
In this article from 2014 ( https://worldmaritimenews.com/archives/134829/annual-global-... ), again just Somalia, "The OEF estimates the total cost of piracy off the coast of Somalia at US$7–US$12 billion in 2010; US$6.6–US$6.9 billion in 2011 42 and US$5.7–US$6.1 billion in 2012".
Between 2008 and 2012 alone JUST the U.S. Navy responded to 1139 piracy incidents https://www.navy.mil/ah_online/antipiracy/index.html that's an average of 0.78 incidents a day.
It's not just the U.S. patrolling either. China has launched at least 20 anti-piracy floatillas since 2009 http://cimsec.org/chinas-anti-piracy-flotillas-by-the-number...
If you want to live in a country without a military there are a bunch of them. I wouldn't personally want to live in any of them, but of course everyone is free to do as they see fit.
The U.S. spent $574b on defence and $79b on veterans last year, both increased way above inflation - total of $57b. Education by comparision dropped by 14%, or $9b. Health by 18% or $15b.
The largest slice of the U.S. budget is healthcare (mainly medicare/medicaid). This cost $5,500 per citizen, despite only covering 1/3rd of the population. This is because the U.S. health care system is fundamentally broken, and costs about 3 times as much per person in europe.
tell me: who would invade?
germany has no ambition to conquer france. poland has a buffer to protect it from the russians. estonia is in NATO.
seriously, what threat is going to suddenly gobble up europe?
oh yeah, and where are the millions of US troops currently stationed in europe that would supposedly stop the threat?
Not entirely true. It has no standing army, but it does have a militarized coast guard, air defense systems and an air force base it maintains, as well as a small Crisis Response Unit that can be deployed internationally. In addition it is a full NATO member for which it has certain costs.
If you funded your military appropriately, we wouldn't have to fund your defense.
Your comment about healthcare is so simplistic it's not even worth a reply, but I'll simply note that the vast majority are not on medicare or medicaid and are covered by private insurance. Your assertion that the system is broken is simplistic and uninformed (ETA, I'm not saying the system isn't broken, there are many issues with healthcare in the US, but "just be like Europe" isn't going to work for so many reasons it's not really feasible to list them here).
Canada spends $4800 a year on healthcare in total -- under half that of the U.S. Israel spends $2800.
That's a sign of a broken system.
Use Canada's system, cut your mediacare/aid tax, and your companies no longer need to spend money on healthcare when employing them. Using Canada's system removes the tax on jobs that the U.S. loves so much.
> You get to have that system because the US has taken on the role of global police
Why? Who benefitted from invading Iraq? Who benefits from a dozen different aircraft carrier groups around the world?
Again, your numbers don't really have any meaning on the healthcare thing. It's a far more complex discussion than you are attempting to make it.
The U.S. military doesn't seem to protect anyone against modern threats - terrorism, propaganda, rigging elections, etc.
Our defence budget is 1% of GDP because we are betting on the US (and a few others) continuing to spend as it does, and that it will be in their national interest to help us if the time comes.
If the US slashed its defence budget to a 'reasonable' level, we would have to increase ours in turn to the best of our abilities. If the US brought theirs down all the way to 1%, the only people laughing would be the PLA and Putin himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swis...
[1] Patrol boats of the Grenzwachtkorps.
These kinds of stories usually start out with some bidders putting together a killer power point deck and making a pitch, just like that LLC of TWO people that won that disastrous contract to rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid, or those guys that the movie "War Dogs" is about.
Sometimes they're upstanding folks who do a good job, sometimes they're fraudsters, sometimes they mean well but just can't deliver, sometimes they deliver but with comical cost overruns (name your favorite defense contractor).
So, if someone does something seemingly egregiously careless, but they investigate after being found out, that nullifies the carelessness, in your mind?
I think we may agree to disagree on that point.
The questions now are who screwed up the oversight, whether or not there was fraud or crony-ism, and what actions can be taken against this contractor in terms of cancelling/auditing their other contracts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Don't misunderstand me. This isn't an argument against government; it's an argument against this budgeting model. There has to be a way they to structure private sector budgeting efficiency into public organizations.
It's a very pervasive problem; I'm sure whoever figures out a finance structure that minimizes it without breaking anything else will win a novel prize
I know that I and the people around me worked hard to do a good job on our project. I would hire any of those people. I also saw a great deal of the government is run by MVPs built by Feds on their own initiative.
On the other hand, the projects (including ours) I saw to replace those MVPs were largely staffed by incompetent or unfocused contractors, and I believe that is where a huge amount of waste comes in.
These contractors are once removed from even government and the waste results from this Milton Friedman push for privatization of government functions to organizations just trying to log billable hours.
And I realize that it's partly that not everyone in government shares that sentiment, which is probably where a big part of the problem comes in, but that's another thing I don't understand. How can people not care so much?
-Gordon Gekko
That said, some central governing body does need to make sure certain needs of the community are taken care of. That way, we ensure that the whole community is taken care of and we're not in an every man for himself scenario where the "strong" prevail and the "weak" die off. When the government provides military to protect it's citizens, it does so for all citizens, not just the rich, not just the city dwellers. I guess the question is -to what else does this apply and to what extent?
Furthermore, government uses the military for anything else than the protection of its citizens. How many of US military campaigns are for protection and how many is to support the military industrial complex?
But it's probably going to be very easy easy. Police or Fire or other public departments order the coffee every day which gets buried as an office expense and taxpayers foot the bill. The bureaucracies are happy. Starbucks is happy. No one else, uh, notices.
I wonder whose money Verizon spent to purchase Yahoo.
"You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask".
-- Jim Fisk ( War Profiteer )what about when you're spending your parents' money on a cell phone for them?
"And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government."
Is 100% incorrect. In fact, much of the bureaucracy we have in government is used for ensuring these types of things don't happen. It's why there are committees, reviews, approval chains out the wazoo, etc.
Those committees, reviews, and approval chains are just distributed responsibility mechanisms to remove the responsibility to think critically about the entire expenditure, which is Friedman's point.
10 people thinking about narrow, nonoverlapping aspects of a large thing will never be as effective as less people considering all aspects of that large thing.
Your alternative has been tried and fails when you have to replace that all-considering function with another at the end of its life and the other one isn’t so good. It’s a less robust system.
Bureaucracy isn’t inherently bad, it’s just like, a model of designing complex systems.
Edit: in fact downthread we have someone literally arguing that it would be good to cut the IRS budget despite every $1 cut costing $7 in tax evasion.
Don't misunderstand me. This isn't an argument against government; it's an argument against this budgeting model. There has to be a way they to structure private sector budgeting efficiency into public organizations.
Those committees are very expensive, tho'. Every one of them is an example of a bureaucrat spending money on his or her colleagues, and in return they will be appointed to committees and boards and fact-finding junkets and all the rest.
-Milton Friedman