https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25304738
This might be a relevant story I read today on China.
Plenty of our democratic leaders have made idiotic self-serving decisions concerning the pandemic too (I'm looking at you, Nancy Pelosi)
Re:Billionaires Build
by jessaustin on Friday December 04, 2020 @07:50PM
(#25310447)
I don't think she's ever been a scientist or engineer?
Re:Billionaires Build
by claudeganon on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:50PM
(#25308593)
Right, I was just responding to the question, whose posing is often used to suggest that the US is the best of all possible resource allocation worlds. I don't want to live under a regime like the CCP, but we did just run this experiment and the U.S. system of resource allocation failed miserably.
I don't think it's the best of all possible worlds, but it is better than some.
Only a small percentage of billionaires do incredibly valuable things, but those who do are doing things that I can't imagine the US government of today ever doing. The US government would be having meetings to schedule the meeting to discuss the meeting schedule, or fighting over culture war issues.
You don't think that the culture war issues are manufactured to distract the masses from endless war, tax cuts, corporate subsidies, etc?
I think that the government has been sabotaged. Intentionally impairing it's functions to justify the critiques of functionally.
"I want to make the government small enough to drown in a tub"
"Government doesn't work, elect me and I'll prove it"(that one's a joke but conveys the point)
Theres not that many billionaires, so I'm not sure how relevant percentages of billionaires is
I chalk up China's governmental competence to the number of scientists and engineers involved in their government. It may be authoritarian and a bit of a nightmare, but unlike the majority of other governments in the world you have a few decision makers in there who have some clue how the world actually works. Most other government are run by lawyers, career bureaucrats, delusional ideologues, or leaders who inherited their position either officially via some line of succession or de-facto via institutional nepotism.
There are some of all those categories in China's government, but there are also apparently enough people who actually know how to do things in the real world.