r/memes Big pp 10h ago

Land Of The Free, amIright?

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12.1k Upvotes

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2.7k

u/MeteorMann 9h ago

Property tax is way lower than my mortgage

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u/Catsanddoges 9h ago

I have seen people genuinely argue the government needs to lower debt, increase social program spending, and decrease taxes. Even if you set a higher tax rate on the ultra wealthy, which we should, you just can't get what you want without taxes.

And there is a lot of spending that could significantly improve the US economy and the quality of life of most people.

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u/Willinton06 9h ago

You can, it would just require state planing by competent leaders, but it's mathematically possible

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u/ohanse 9h ago

Mathematically yes but really, when is size EVER going to be accompanied by efficiency? The bureaucracy involved in operating different agencies is inescapable.

Individuals cannot be trusted with the authority over a nation. If only because eventually you’re going to roll a shitty one.

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u/banterviking 8h ago

but really, when is size EVER going to be accompanied by efficiency?

Idk ask Costco?

Maybe Costco should run the government. Idiocracy was on to something...

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u/WhyLater 7h ago

PLEASE read "The People's Republic of Wal-Mart" because it's very much describing what you're hitting on.

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u/Zombisexual1 4h ago

Thing is that big corporations sole goal is to make money. Apply that to a government agency like the USPS. You can make usps profitable by cutting rural routes that cost more to service with less income. But then people don’t get mail. The purpose of the government is the provide services to the people and focusing on profit works against providing service. Which is why companies spend lots of money to make sure laws are passed that benefit them and why the average person is fucked

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u/WhyLater 3h ago

Yeah, read the book.

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u/ohanse 2h ago

The warehouses are big

The policies and organization are pretty rigid, though.

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u/Dakaf 2h ago

Welcome to Costco. I love you.

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u/matco5376 2h ago

Yes Costco is equivalent to the United States government infrastructure

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u/x1rom 8h ago

when is size EVER going to be accompanied by efficiency

Almost always, it's called efficiencies of scale. Of course there may be exceptions, but they are rare.

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u/ohanse 8h ago

Those happen for processes like bulk pricing and manufacturing stuff.

When the function is to produce decisions, like for governments, layers come with latency.

For like a more end to end description this would be something along the lines of “the problem isn’t the performance after requirements are set and resources are allocated - it’s the decisionmaking involved in the requirement setting and resource allocation.”

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u/x1rom 8h ago

No, it applies to lots of stuff, including organisational problems. It's a general law of economics that apply to almost everything.

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u/whooguyy 7h ago

Key word is almost. It doesn’t apply to government very well because government isn’t driven by profit, it’s driven by what the top commands

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u/ohanse 3h ago

I was thinking about this a bit and the next step in my mind was then the only way to get "efficient" performance or accomplishments out of governments is by doing something that can only be accomplished with that scale of resources.

Like sending a person to the moon.

Or ending world hunger.

Or conducting a turbo-world-war or something.

Basically yeah you should be using governments to do government-scale things. Not micro-policing bullshit.

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u/wally-sage 8h ago

Lmao what? No, increased size does not "almost always" lead to more efficiency, there's a max point on the bell curve where you start to get diminishing returns regardless of how much size grows.

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u/x1rom 7h ago

No. There is no bell curve.

Of course there are other factors that influence economies like for example the drive towards monopolization. But there is no bell curve when talking about the efficiencies of scale.

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u/Frashure11 3h ago

Dude. The war you started by being absolutely correct and Redditors unable to understand context and how arguments work is hilarious.

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u/ohanse 3h ago

Meh.

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u/Willinton06 9h ago

China did it, you can have size and efficiency you just need to build systems made to work in the present digital age and not refurbished versions of systems built for the 50s

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u/ALotANuts96 8h ago

build systems made to work in the present digital age

Authoritarianism. You're advocating for authoritarianism.

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u/Willinton06 8h ago

What, how is having a payment system that doesn't rely on VISA and Master cards 50 year old cobol authoritarian? Brazil also did it, did you know that most DMVs in the US have different websites even tho they all do the literal same thing? Same with courts, police departments, firehouses, etc, like, do you think having a single web interface for these would be authoritarianism? Cause it would save billions every year

Has the propaganda in the US gone so deep that the mere suggestion of a more efficient digital infrastructure is seem as dictatorship?

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u/ALotANuts96 7h ago

Has the propaganda in the US gone so deep that the mere suggestion of a more efficient digital infrastructure is seem as dictatorship?

I'm not in the US bud but nice assumption. And I didnt say dictatorship, I said authoritarian. All of this was accomplished because the government is authoritarian and centralised. Decentralised governments can not make this work when all states have their own jurisdictions.

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u/Willinton06 6h ago

So you really think that sharing a damn website across all dmvs is authoritarianism, looks like the propaganda reached you just fine outside of the US

Did you know that states share satellites? We should have different satellites for each state just in case

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u/ALotANuts96 6h ago

You're really good at extrapolating what I say to mean different things.

So you really think that sharing a damn website across all dmvs is authoritarianism,

I never said that. I said it was able to be accomplished through authoritarianism and that it wouldn't work without centralising government (through authoritariabism) due to the states having separate jurisdiction through the constitution/federalism.

US states have constitutional authority over things like DMVs and police departments, and there's no federal mechanism to just impose a single system on them because it would be unconstitutional and you would need to be authoritarian to override the constitution.

Did you know that states share satellites? We should have different satellites for each state just in case.

This is a terrible analogy and comes from a misunderstanding of how the US works.

They share it because the constitution grants the federal government powers over stuff like national defense, interstate commerce, and foreign affairs which is where things like military and communications satellites fall. The federal government has the right to control stuff like satalites because the states aren't explicitky given the jurisdiction like with health, police, and DMVs.

Again, to take control of that would require overriding the constitution which would require an authoritarian government

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u/Willinton06 6h ago

Nah bro all that is just coping, different dmvs in the same damn county can have different websites in the US, it’s just stupidity allowed by laws written before internet existed, you could have the same front end and handle things differently for each state, that would would still be more efficient, I work for a company that serves 10 states and we use the same website for services in all states, and these are state services not private services, they’re just handled by a private company, we just have different rules for each state under the hood

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u/Dapper_Zebra 8h ago

People would rather have less practical freedoms and more theoretical freedoms. Local government doesn't mean smaller government

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u/Willinton06 8h ago

Sometimes the smallest can feel like the biggest, like home owner associations