what comes to mind?

When I hear people say, "the government should do this," "the government should fix that" I wonder what their concept of the government is? Is it a vague expectation of competence absent in other portions of society? What makes that organization uniquely or best qualified to fix said problem?


What about you? What comes to your mind when the government springs into action?

6/11/2009 5:09:06 PM

the people i give a bunch of money to so they can tell me what i can and cant do.

6/11/2009 5:14:21 PM

people who are too afraid to live on their own and accept the consequences for their own actions.

6/11/2009 5:26:19 PM

That I'm about to lose a little bit more freedom. Seriously.

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

--Attributed to Gideon J. Tucker

I have a specific expectation that the "government" should be able to protect property rights and provide for the national defense. It's "uniquely or best qualified" to deal with these problems.

Beyond the areas I listed, things get sketchy. Government is this vast and unwieldy thing that does almost nothing quickly and very few things well--yet, due to human nature, some form of it is necessary.

6/11/2009 5:32:18 PM

Quote :

"people who are too afraid to live on their own and accept the consequences for their own actions."

aren't you a government employee?

6/11/2009 6:02:39 PM

i think of a giant faceless scapegoat

6/11/2009 6:03:33 PM

Jews.

6/11/2009 6:09:58 PM

When people say the gov should fix something, I wonder how many people actually ask them to. If you see a problem that is their responsibility, report it. If you don't like a policy, say something. When I didn't like that the mayor of chapel hill (mayor foy who is now finishing his term) was trying to say that non-chapel hill natives shouldn't be on franklin street for halloween, I went on the local radio & called him out on it (their restrictions were making it hard for even chapel hill natives who didn't live within walking distance of downtown to participate). You can't just wait for gov to fix something that you don't like, you've got to say something.

6/11/2009 6:10:51 PM

Well typically I think of a deliberative body which performs specific functions granted to it by some form of written or traditional law, which can of course be amended.

It shouldn't really be faceless. I mean, it is YOU who elects the people who make up the policy making arms of gov.

But I can see how people think that. It does make for a good scapegoat when life sucks.

6/11/2009 9:58:40 PM

Quote :

"aren't you a government employee?"

Yes, but I work for the local government, which, as a federalist and a conservative, i think should actually have more power. Also, I think law enforcement is one of the legitimate functions of a small, efficient government.

6/11/2009 10:43:54 PM

Quote :

"BAD."

6/11/2009 10:45:05 PM

The current and former administrations made me think of ACC refs. Tons of bad calls and even worse no-calls.

6/11/2009 11:04:33 PM

see i'm one of those ppl that just cant comprehend why we cant be communist or at least more communist. imo the gov should strive to do whats best for the country as a whole. isnt that the point of gov? to like want its ppl to be the best? i say lets make everyone drive hondas. lets make everyone eat healthy. lets ban shit like mcdonalds. come on america!

[Edited on June 12, 2009 at 1:29 AM. Reason : life could still be pretty awesome even if stuff like that was changed]

[Edited on June 12, 2009 at 1:29 AM. Reason : .]

6/12/2009 1:28:23 AM

bad: I think of a police officer digging through my shit

good: unemployment checks!

6/12/2009 10:02:19 AM

^^ communism doesn't work because people are self interested, greedy, short-sighted asshats, at least the ones that want to tell other people what is best for them are. Its kinda like all those rich 'go green' ass clowns that fly all over the country telling you to go green, and then living in a house that uses 5x the power mine does. Or those dingle-berries that think the prius is the answer to carbon emission from cars (completely ignoring the fact that once factoring in the environmental cost of building the damn thing, you've gotta run 120,000 miles before it becomes more eco-friendly then my jeep (and about 200k before the savings on gas makes up for the higher sticker price).

Also see:
Banning smoking in bars, trans-fats, fast food, bacon (its gonna be next, and then you will all be up in arms). Because you shouldn't eat unhealthy food.

Hippies protesting paper company's for cutting down trees (ignoring that they plant more tress then any other group).

Corn-based ethanol (processing the corn cause more harm to the environment then it saves if you use it as a less efficient fuel source)


Add this to the fact that our federal (and state) governments couldn't run a profitable bake sale (assuming they could figure out what to bake, where to have the sale, and who should do the actual work) the less place these people have their hands the better your life has the chance to be, provided you put the effort into it.

6/12/2009 10:47:32 AM

^ should we have a independently contracted military as well?

6/12/2009 10:50:53 AM

on a federal level the government should

1) Uphold the Constitution of the United States
2) Regulate interstate commerce (SEC, FCC)
3) Judical review to ensure due process at the lower levels (SCOTUS)
4) Provide relief and assistance in case of disaster (National Guard)
5) Defend our country's borders and citizens abroad (military, cia, nsa)
6) Negotiate treaties with foreign powers

6/12/2009 11:03:19 AM

well thats convenient.

who made up that fancy list?

6/12/2009 11:03:58 AM

1) Uphold the Constitution of the United States - given that's what allows for the federal government, this should be a given

2) Regulate interstate commerce - US Constitution Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 (SEC, FCC)

3) Judical review to ensure due process at the lower levels - US Constitution Article 3 (SCOTUS)

4) Provide relief and assistance in case of disaster - US Constitution Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 provides for the creation of the guard. Titles 10 and 32 of the US Code provide for roles and organization. (National Guard)

5) Defend our country's borders and citizens abroad - US Constitution Preamble and Article IV, Section 4 (military, cia, nsa)

6) Negotiate treaties with foreign powers - US Constitution Article 2

6/12/2009 11:15:17 AM

so you just cherry picked all of that stuff?

6/12/2009 11:19:40 AM

you can add to it, as long as you can back the government program form a constitutional stand point, which means, for starters, they can get the hell out of healthcare. Its nice, but its not the federal governments job to provide it or to provide for it.

6/12/2009 11:25:00 AM

Busy-bodies and people who have to justify their own existence somehow.

6/12/2009 11:30:41 AM

to the original question

My government employee friend with his slack work schedule (9 days ever 2 weeks) that spends more time IMing people from his blackberry then working (i hope he reads this post)

6/12/2009 11:36:42 AM

Quote :

"Busy-bodies and people who have to justify their own existence somehow."

and that differs from the populace at large how?

6/12/2009 11:36:46 AM

it seems like people on this board are trying to justify their own lame existence.

6/12/2009 11:41:17 AM

o no, i've just got a traffic profile hammering a test network. I'm watching pretty graphs on my other monitor, this is helping pass the time until it finishes.

6/12/2009 11:43:02 AM

Quote :

"Why Government Can't Run a Business Politicians need headlines. Executives need profits. The Obama administration is bent on becoming a major player in -- if not taking over entirely -- America's health-care, automobile and banking industries. Before that happens, it might be a good idea to look at the government's track record in running economic enterprises. It is terrible. In 1913, for instance, thinking it was being overcharged by the steel companies for armor plate for warships, the federal government decided to build its own plant. It estimated that a plant with a 10,000-ton annual capacity could produce armor plate for only 70% of what the steel companies charged. When the plant was finally finished, however -- three years after World War I had ended -- it was millions over budget and able to produce armor plate only at twice what the steel companies charged. It produced one batch and then shut down, never to reopen. Or take Medicare. Other than the source of its premiums, Medicare is no different, economically, than a regular health-insurance company. But unlike, say, UnitedHealthcare, it is a bureaucracy-beclotted nightmare, riven with waste and fraud. Last year the Government Accountability Office estimated that no less than one-third of all Medicare disbursements for durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs and hospital beds, were improper or fraudulent. Medicare was so lax in its oversight that it was approving orthopedic shoes for amputees. These examples are not aberrations; they are typical of how governments run enterprises. There are a number of reasons why this is inherently so. Among them are: 1) Governments are run by politicians, not businessmen. Politicians can only make political decisions, not economic ones. They are, after all, first and foremost in the re-election business. Because of the need to be re-elected, politicians are always likely to have a short-term bias. What looks good right now is more important to politicians than long-term consequences even when those consequences can be easily foreseen. The gathering disaster of Social Security has been obvious for years, but politics has prevented needed reforms. And politicians tend to favor parochial interests over sound economic sense. Consider a thought experiment. There is a national widget crisis and Sen. Wiley Snoot is chairman of the Senate Widget Committee. There are two technologies that are possible solutions to the problem, with Technology A widely thought to be the more promising of the two. But the company that has been developing Technology B is headquartered in Sen. Snoot's state and employs 40,000 workers there. Which technology is Sen. Snoot going to use his vast legislative influence to push? 2) Politicians need headlines. And this means they have a deep need to do something ("Sen. Snoot Moves on Widget Crisis!"), even when doing nothing would be the better option. Markets will always deal efficiently with gluts and shortages, but letting the market work doesn't produce favorable headlines and, indeed, often produces the opposite ("Sen. Snoot Fails to Move on Widget Crisis!"). 3) Governments use other people's money. Corporations play with their own money. They are wealth-creating machines in which various people (investors, managers and labor) come together under a defined set of rules in hopes of creating more wealth collectively than they can create separately. So a labor negotiation in a corporation is a negotiation over how to divide the wealth that is created between stockholders and workers. Each side knows that if they drive too hard a bargain they risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs for both sides. Just ask General Motors and the United Auto Workers. But when, say, a school board sits down to negotiate with a teachers union or decide how many administrators are needed, the goose is the taxpayer. That's why public-service employees now often have much more generous benefits than their private-sector counterparts. And that's why the New York City public school system had an administrator-to-student ratio 10 times as high as the city's Catholic school system, at least until Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a more than competent businessman before he entered politics) took charge of the system. 4) Government does not tolerate competition. The Obama administration is talking about creating a "public option" that would compete in the health-insurance marketplace with profit-seeking companies. But has a government entity ever competed successfully on a level playing field with private companies? I don't know of one. 5) Government enterprises are almost always monopolies and thus do not face competition at all. But competition is exactly what makes capitalism so successful an economic system. The lack of it has always doomed socialist economies. When the federal government nationalized the phone system in 1917, justifying it as a wartime measure that would lower costs, it turned it over to the Post Office to run. (The process was called "postalization," a word that should send shivers down the back of any believer in free markets.) But despite the promise of lower prices, practically the first thing the Post Office did when it took over was . . . raise prices. Cost cutting is alien to the culture of all bureaucracies. Indeed, when cost cutting is inescapable, bureaucracies often make cuts that will produce maximum public inconvenience, generating political pressure to reverse the cuts. 6) Successful corporations are run by benevolent despots. The CEO of a corporation has the power to manage effectively. He decides company policy, organizes the corporate structure, and allocates resources pretty much as he thinks best. The board of directors ordinarily does nothing more than ratify his moves (or, of course, fire him). This allows a company to act quickly when needed. But American government was designed by the Founding Fathers to be inefficient, and inefficient it most certainly is. The president is the government's CEO, but except for trivial matters he can't do anything without the permission of two separate, very large committees (the House and Senate) whose members have their own political agendas. Government always has many cooks, which is why the government's broth is so often spoiled. 7) Government is regulated by government. When "postalization" of the nation's phone system appeared imminent in 1917, Theodore Vail, the president of AT&T, admitted that his company was, effectively, a monopoly. But he noted that "all monopolies should be regulated. Government ownership would be an unregulated monopoly." It is government's job to make and enforce the rules that allow a civilized society to flourish. But it has a dismal record of regulating itself. Imagine, for instance, if a corporation, seeking to make its bottom line look better, transferred employee contributions from the company pension fund to its own accounts, replaced the money with general obligation corporate bonds, and called the money it expropriated income. We all know what would happen: The company accountants would refuse to certify the books and management would likely -- and rightly -- end up in jail. But that is exactly what the federal government (which, unlike corporations, decides how to keep its own books) does with Social Security. In the late 1990s, the government was running what it -- and a largely unquestioning Washington press corps -- called budget "surpluses." But the national debt still increased in every single one of those years because the government was borrowing money to create the "surpluses." Capitalism isn't perfect. Indeed, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous description of democracy, it's the worst economic system except for all the others. But the inescapable fact is that only the profit motive and competition keep enterprises lean, efficient, innovative and customer-oriented."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124277530070436823.html

[Edited on June 12, 2009 at 12:46 PM. Reason : .]

6/12/2009 12:46:09 PM

Quote :

"what comes to mind? When I hear people say, "the government should do this," "the government should fix that" I wonder what their concept of the government is?"

Skipped reading the thread, just shooting from the hip... in this case government = "someone that isn't me".

6/12/2009 1:06:32 PM

Quote :

"When when"

Now that my thread creating errors are out of the way . . .


I ask this question because I don't think people consider what they're asking for when they say that, "the government should." As Hunt's article alluded to above, while it is a monopoly, it has no monopoly on talent.

So, for example, when people want a government run health-care system, the presumption is that it will be more efficient, or at least more equitable than the current system. However, in all likelihood, it wouldn't be run by health-care professionals, but by mid-level bureaucrats; everywhere from the kind you deal with at the DMV to the ones who work in downtown Raleigh.


Anyway, more opinions please . . .

6/12/2009 3:30:04 PM

Quote :

"government = "someone that isn't me"."

Bingo.

6/12/2009 6:54:05 PM

CASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME

6/13/2009 3:48:32 AM

Quote :

"government = "someone that isn't me"."

Bingo.

6/13/2009 8:20:32 AM