I’ve been trying, but everytime I do, a Democrat or Republican still gets in there. 
There are a number of services, from land-line telephones to cable TV, where my choice is to either deal with a very specific corporation, or do without that service.
Which is pretty much analogous to the situation we’re in with government in any of its service-providing areas. Veterans don’t have to go to VA hospitals, which were crappy for many years, until Clinton put people in charge who insisted that they work; now they provide some of the best, and most cost-efficient, care in America. (Walter Reed’s an Army hospital, unaffiliated with the VA.) FEMA was a ‘turkey farm’ under Bush I, then Clinton’s people forced it to actually do its job, and it did. Now under Bush II, it’s a turkey farm again.
The fact is, government can, and quite often does, work quite well. It’s a matter of whether you’ve got people running the government who are willing to put the sweat into making the government do what it’s supposed to do.
The odds are a lot better if you’ve got a President who actually believes in a working government. Kinda like this one said he did when he was running for President, but he was clearly lying.
Amen. I worked for a state regulatory agency for several years, under two governors, and the difference in how the agency functioned under the different sets of appointed commissioners was remarkable. I saw hacks at play and I saw dedicated, hard-working civil servants who did a damned fine job.
Well, “land-line phone” is an artificial category, but if it is a monopoly, that’s because the government has made it so. Cell phones and satellite TV compete well with the corporations you mentioned.
Just to be clear, I never said it doesn’t. It’s just that the odds are lower when the competition is non-existent.
Yes and no. Some things are better left to the private sector, but I do agree that Bush is a lousy manager in most cases. Although we don’t have such a system, injured veterans would probably get better care if they were given a (very generous) medical allowance and could shop around for their medical treatment. And since we don’t have such a system, Bush needs to make the current system work-- and he’s clearly failed in this particular instance.
Let’s break that down a bit, shall we?
As of January, there were 22.1 million government employees in the U.S. Those ~39,000 county (~3100) and sub-county (35,933) governments employed a collective 14.3 million people, of whom 8 million were in the education sector, according to the BLS. Teachers, principals, guidance counselors, school janitors, and I’m sure a few education bureaucrats. That’s 205 education employees and 161 non-educaton employees per governmental unit. And probably only a couple of those apply to you.
How are they working? If there’s a problem, go to county board meetings or town council meetings, and kick up a fuss. You don’t have to fix them all, just yours.
Similarly at the state level. 5.1 million employees, of which 2.3 million are in education (a combination of state public ed bureaucracy and state colleges and universities, I’d expect), and 2.8 million non-ed. That’s in 50 states and D.C. - Puerto Rico, the USVI, and other US territories aren’t in the BLS labor statistics. So that’s 45,100 education employees and 54,900 non-ed employees per state, give or take. And you’ve only got one of them to worry about. Again, what’s working reasonably well, and what’s not? Identify the parts that don’t work, and make a fuss about them.
At the Federal level, you’ll surely need help; there’s only so much one person can do to kick up a fuss. There are 2.71 million Federal employees, and about 770,000 are USPS. My mail gets here, usually pretty quickly. Then there’s the other 1.95 million Federal employees. Again, where’s the problem? If you don’t like how FEMA did in 2005, let your Congresscritters know. If they don’t appear to care that Bush is staffing the government with hacks who couldn’t run a two-car funeral, then find out who’s running against them, and do what you can to help them. People who want and expect government to accomplish its stated purposes are going to get government to work better than those that don’t.
If you just plain don’t want government, then I recommend (as I have often in the past) going to some de facto ungoverned part of Africa or Asia, and starting up your own de facto government, your own Libertaria. But if you want government to actually work, what I’ve written here applies.
Land-line phone is an artificial category IYHO. I find it to be a very distinct service in many ways. And it’s a monopoly because it’s incredibly expensive for a startup to run another set of wires to every house.
There are such things as ‘natural monopolies’.
Agreed. This wasn’t so much a reply to you as moving from your remark to the larger discussion.
The first problem is, people don’t do a very good job of ‘shopping’ for medical services. In order to make informed decisions, we need the advice of the very people we’re paying for advice. Second is that in the case of veterans, the allowance would have to be tailored to each individual case, since one vet’s lingering combat injury is different from another’s. One may cost $5000 this year, the other $500,000. Third is that this is a service whose provision is dictated not by the market, but by political support; unless a viable market can artificially be created, the mere fact of private providers doesn’t create an advantage. And creating a consumer-driven market in health care or health insurance is, as I’ve already pointed out, much more challenging than a consumer-driven market in microwave ovens.
Are you saying that land-line phone service is unaffected by cell phone service? That land-line companies can lock in people regardless of shitty service and not suffer significant customer base loss to cell phones?
Maybe, but land-line phones and cable TV are not good examples.
So, you’re saying that few of the people suffering from horrible service at Walter Reed would not have gone elsewhere if they had been given a medical allowance instead of veteran’s benefits at that particular hospital? If not, I’m not sure what your point is.
I’m saying that they provide overlapping but different services, and there is no competition at all on the landline side.
First of all, they weren’t given veteran’s benefits at Walter Reed. Walter Reed is an Army hospital, not a VA hospital.
Second, like I said, the benefit has to be sufficient to the need, which varies with each individual soldier. If an injured soldier needs a half-million dollars worth of work to put his face back together, and the ‘generous allowance’ is $150,000, going elsewhere isn’t an option.
Sure. But that kind of comment is a far cry from your original melodramatic generalizations that “the government is always going to treat you like shit” and “it’s evil”.
If you want people to take your rational criticisms of the inherent problems of government seriously, don’t intersperse them with silly-ass doom-laden hyperbole.
Yes, but it never gets below “Good Job, Gates-ey!”
Yes, I understand that I can vent. I can go to the local meetings and raise a ruckus as you suggest. I can dispatch an e-mail to my Congressman. I can go to the polls and vote. But none of that applies to what Frank said. He said that the 23 million people should be held “responsible for their individual actions” in response to RickJay’s suggestion that a good place to start would be reducing government’s size. That’s 23 million times however many individual actions in whatever span of time. It does not seem possible even to examine those individual actions, let alone do anything about them. Frank’s suggestion only makes RickJay’s suggestion all the more appealing.
But to the point you seem to be making, let us set aside any comparison between my appearance at the local meeting and the golf outings that the local meet-holders have with their most valuable contributors. We won’t even examine the absurdity of stipulating that my two-minute complaints at the meeting is anywhere nearly as effective as the four-hour excursions from tee to shining tee.
Instead, let’s look at what I can do to hold them responsible. Can I sue them? Can I walk down to the road in front of my house and take down their ugly-ass sign? Can I beat them about the head and shoulders until they finally build a sidewalk in areas they annexed three years ago? Yes, I can yack. And yes, I can write letters. But if that what is meant by “holding them responsible”, then it doesn’t mean anything at all.
A non sequitur and red herring all rolled into one. I have always advocated a very strong government.
But the essence of a monopoly is non-competition. Your local water service is a monopoly, since few people can sink a well and provide their own water. Some people may be forced to use a land-line, but not enough to eliminate the competition. And besides, as I said earlier, the land-line companies wouldn’t have a lock on that service if not for government action. So, if you really insist, I’ll change my original challenge to: name one corporation that you must deal with as a customer that doesn’t have a lock on its business due to government action.
Fine, my bad. But irrelevant to the fundamental argument.
So what? That’s exactly how insurance works. Your objection doesn’t make a privatized system unworkable-- it just makes it different.
Does too.
Making a government smaller will not make it less soulless.
You make it less soulless by making sure that government is responsive to its bosses - you and me. You do that by talking, complaining, writing, voting. The govenment will instill in its employees a virtue of responsiveness if we make it clear that’s what we want.
In my recent excursion through the wilds of the bureaucracies of the US and Canadian governments, I received nothing but exemplary service from the Canadian government. The human representatives of that government were unfailingly polite and helpful, and always recognized my needs and desires, even if they could not be fulfilled.
It can be done. It requires a desire to do it, and that can only come from us.
That’s because my point was you don’t need to deal with more than a fraction of those people - a pretty minute fraction too, if you’re addressing a problem in state or local government.
Read, then post.
And if it’s just you, they know that you’re a crazy crank with no credibility. (Especially if you’re anything IRL like you are here.) Someone like you might have to actually learn to work and play well with others in order to hold public officials responsible.
Look, we’ve been around this one too often, over too long, to bullshit each other. You only believe in ‘a very strong government’ under definitions of ‘government,’ ‘strong,’ and AFAIK ‘very’ and ‘a,’ that only make sense to you and a handful of other libertarians.
What most people, under quite a range of varying definitions, would call ‘a very strong government,’ you would, and have often in the past, called ‘tyranny.’ Hell, you’ve called some pretty weak uses of governmental authority by that name.
So kindly take your bullshit semantic games and have a good time with them, but leave me out of them.
I confess I’ve completely lost sight of your point here.
You hadn’t said you were talking about insurance; you were talking about letting them shop around for treatment. I took you at your word.
But here, we’re talking about people with pre-existing conditions - some quite drastic, btw. You are aware that getting pre-existing conditions covered is a bit of a challenge, right? And you’re aware that the complexities of insurance can befuddle even very intelligent consumers, let alone a vet with half his head blown away?
So, I take it you don’t want to join my League of Irresponsible Voters?
People say I’m too naive and trusting of others for advocating private charity over government subsidy; but then you come along and propose that if we will only give people armies with guns and enormous power and surround them with luxury and staffs of servants, their angelic and philanthropic souls with shine forth and give us everything we want. I mean, Jesus.
There are plenty of opposite experience anecdotes out there.
But that’s exactly what RickJay suggested, and what Frank and you attacked — reduce the numbers. What are you, arguing with yourself?
I’ll take that as a concession that I would have none of these alleged fairlyland recourses that you and Frank are dreaming up.
Tyranny has nothing to do with what size a government is; it has to do with how a government behaves. A government that is both strong and principled is not tyrannical.
I have to remember - when tempted to engage you in the future - that you are not normal.
I think power corrupts, and I think that a vast, complicated system is less accessible to people outside it than a limited, simple one. If that makes me abnormal, then so be it.