In fact, those government hating people have significant incentive to continue to balls it up worse.

"Look how shitty government is, elect me to fix it"

"But the government has run by people that hate government will never fix the problem."

Who, exactly, are you referring to?

It's not like the stuff the article covers started in January of 2017. Who, exactly, in the chain of command here "hates government"?

The OP is probably referring to the state legislature, the governor, and people appointed by the governor.

The state government is controlled by Republicans and though not all Republicans "hate" every aspect of the government, a large contingent of party could be accurately described as hating government involvement in areas they don't agree with--like welfare, disability, healthcare etc...

The leader of the party has explicitly advocated for allowing and encouraging the current healthcare system (the ACA) to implode, so that he can replace it with something else. He also placed people in charge of departments who explicitly stated that such departments shouldn't exist.

This problem didn't start in 2017, it started with the Reagan presidency.

This started long before Reagan. Even Andrew Jackson allowed the Charter of the ancestor of the Federal Reserve to expire.

The consequences of which affect precisely nobody today.

In 2019, we are living in a world where one of the two parties made bad government a cornerstone of their party's policy, ~35 years ago. We are now reaping the wages of that decision.

Yes, this is largely because disability has become the defacto welfare system.

Very very few people who don't believe in the mission of whatever their organization does make it very long in government. Government organizations are such a political and bureaucratic nightmare that you need to believe in what they do to be able to see past all that.

The guy who's shooting dogs for the ATF might thing the DEA is scum and the guy who's shooting dogs for the DEA might think the ATF is a waste but they both believe in the mission of their organization (or at least to the extent needed to do their jobs). They don't care or even realize that shooting dogs isn't their mission, it's just what the incentive structure tells them to do.

I think you misunderstood the comment. The guy who's shooting dogs for the ATF isn't who's meant by "person running the government". It's the elected/appointed officials who hate government. These don't have to last very long to cause a lot of damage. Look at Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke.

I see where you're coming from but none of the stuff related to the article is happening on that level. It isn't top down intentional negligence that's causing these sorts of incentive misalignment. It seems to be good old fashioned incompetence.

These doctors are shooting all the dogs (metaphorically speaking of course) but they're shooting all the dogs because the organization they work within has incentivized that behavior. It's not a top down policy to shoot (metaphorical) dogs. It just so happens that if your top down policy is to suck at everything then there's no motivation to stop the people at the leafs of the organizational tree from shooting dogs (denying disability wrongly as a matter of standard) practice. I think this is incompetence, not malice. The people actually misbehaving are too far removed from policy for this to be malice.

All of this stuff is happening at a high level. At the low level it’s all people responding to their incentives, it’s the high level that sets up the system.

Surely there are incentives at work at higher levels as well? That isn't "outside" the system.

People at the bottom can only change their own actions. So if 3/4 of them act well you still have a problem. However, if 3/4 at the top act directly they can change the rules.

Many of the incentives that act on higher levels are set in the Constitution or well-established law. The laws become a little bit worse from this perspective every year, as new forms of nest-feathering are introduced and entrenched. The system as it exists "incentivizes" this process. This will not be fixed by those whose own incentives lock them into this system, whatever level they inhabit.

The US is not in a steady downward spiral. Some years things improve and others they get worse, but it’s individuals that make the decisions shaping history.

Of course USA is not in a downward anything. USA government on the other hand is certainly circling the bowl. There is a difference between those! It may be that various states of America will eventually decide on a different way of organizing society. I'm hopeful, because when things change they often get better.

It's curious that you can see how incentives shape the behavior of some people, but not that of other people.

I am specifically saying the US government has been more and less corrupt in the past.

It’s not about people at the top responding differently it’s about the flow of influence. If 20% of the people at the bottom behave poorly the other people at the bottom have little influence. That changes at the top as it’s easyer to monitor a small group of people and their actions are more documented.

Ex: A cashier can fail to scan items for their friends at checkout and without any form of paper trail. The CFO can do more harm, but it’s harder for them to act in secret.

"Very very few people who don't believe in the mission of whatever their organization does make it very long in government. Government organizations are such a political and bureaucratic nightmare that you need to believe in what they do to be able to see past all that. "

That's simply not true. Go to DC and you will meet a lot of dedicated and highly qualified people working at agencies. And they stay around. The real problem is Congress and some of the media that just scream "government bad" and "deep state" instead of doing their job which is to give the agencies guidance and fixing problems.