The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by fyfy18 on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:30PM (#22721877)

Wait... isn't that exactly what the article says they tried to do?

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by pdonis on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:34PM (#22721924)

The government tried, but then canceled the contract at the request of the big company that had bought out the small company they originally had the contract with.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by neffy on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:38PM (#22721973)

Exactly. The issue in some sense isn't government, it's the corruption of government by corporations that have been allowed to become to big and to powerful, to the extent that the US Government itself has been deliberately defunded. (Sure, I know Government spending grows every year, but so does the money supply and corporate profits. Control for monetary expansion, and the US Government's portion of the economy has been steadily shrinking.)

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by pdonis on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:47PM (#22722048)

> The issue in some sense isn't government, it's the corruption of government

Ok, so how do we keep the government from being corrupted? Nobody has yet solved that problem, and people have been trying for centuries.

> Control for monetary expansion, and the US Government's portion of the economy has been steadily shrinking.

The money supply is not the same as the economy. Government spending as a percentage of GDP, which is the closest estimate we have to "the size of the economy", has been growing, not shrinking.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by m0xte on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:56PM (#22722148)

Well the first thing you do is ban professional politicians and lobbying.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by amanaplanacanal on Sunday March 29, 2020 @05:16PM (#22722830)

The trick is doing that while still having some semblance of free speech, and allowing constituents to talk to their representatives about what problems they are seeing.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by pdonis on Sunday March 29, 2020 @06:19PM (#22723297)

As I commented upthread, your solution is to just change the entire system of government. Sure, that should be simple. Not.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by m0xte on Monday March 30, 2020 @04:51AM (#22726276)

Big problems require drastic changes.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by AnthonyMouse on Sunday March 29, 2020 @04:06PM (#22722224)

> Control for monetary expansion, and the US Government's portion of the economy has been steadily shrinking.

What? No it hasn't. It has kept pace with GDP since the end of WWII (prior to WWII it was much smaller), and the rate of GDP growth is higher than the rate of inflation. The size of government in the US has been growing continuously in real terms since before Eisenhower.

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