If you've ever seen any body cam footage on YouTube I'd wager that about half of them have a moment where the cop is asking someone for information they're not legally required to provide, and it's framed as "I have to investigate." The smart ones reply with some flavor of "ok, I'm not required to help you investigate."
This seems like a much more invasive, much more expensive version of that. "We have [potentially spurious] evidence that this application is used in way we deem a Bad Thing. We need to violate the privacy of this company and thousands of individuals to gather evidence that we should be required to get before bringing this suit in the first place, but we're the government so we don't have to do that."
It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
> It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
If only there were a system to align incentives toward a common good under the assumption that everyone is corrupt and will therefore seek to maximize their own interests....
What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy? No one's making any money from that. But it causes damages to everyone.
You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
> What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy?
Well, in a purely capitalist economy, the answer would be property rights, competition, and liability. For example, a road would be owned by someone, and you could sue that someone for damages if the road damaged your car. A road owner could discharge liability risk by purchacing insurance, and insurance underwriters could require some minimum standard of maintenance from owners in exchange.
> You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
The whole point of the article that spawned these discussions is that society has already delegated the responsibility for fixing potholes to the government, and the government is doing a crappy enough job of fixing potholes that "art activists" need to make potholes into public art projects to get the government to actually do its job.
Some libertarians moved in the small town of Grafton, NH [0], with the explicit goal of turning it into a "Free Town".
> This resulted in eliminating funding to the county's senior-citizens council, town offices going unheated during the winter, poorly maintained roads filled with potholes, and the Grafton Police Department being reduced to one officer (the police chief), who said he was unable to answer calls for service as the town had no money to repair the one police vehicle left. Other issues were inconsistent basic public services, such as trash collection.
Most roads are unprofitable individually, but still beneficial to the greater economy. It's very unrealistic to expect private individuals to build and maintain them. And the logistics of paying for every street one drives one, and the profiteering this enables sounds hellish.
There was a time when the government was able to build and fix stuff. We should probably get to fixing that, by kicking out the parasitic contracters, actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages, taxing the ever-increasing wealth of the top 1%, etc. Not by privatizing roads, which is a nonsensical idea that failed miserably anytime it was tried.
The golden age of America (and the West) happened when redistributive taxation was maximal and the government had the means and the will to improve citizens life. We've been privatizing stuff ever since the 1980s with arguably disastrous results. It's time we came back to first base.
You can be a libertarian without being a capitalist, and you can be a capitalist without being a libertarian, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with a [completely accurate] libertarian dig when the original point was that if the system was more capitalist, it would get fixed faster and better.
> actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages
I think most people would be open to increasing cash government salaries if the rest of the job also matched the broader economy - at-will employment, no public sector unions, etc. You trade some of your cash compensation in the government for the cushy benefits, sub-40 hour work week and lots of time off, and the near impossibility of being fired especially once you've been there for a few decades.
The golden age of the West happened due to a war-time manufacturing boom that would put the industrial revolution to shame. If you're making a ton of money and your marginal tax rate is 90%, what incentive do you have to work another ten hours a week or open another factor or release a new product if you're only keeping 10% of what you earn?
How many of those unemployed people want to get a job filling potholes, or mowing the lawn at the park? How many are qualified to do anything about pollution in whatever specific sense you mean? What job does your average unemployed person get to "fight housing shortages" or whatever you're trying to say?
> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
Any system that isn't designed from the outside? Any system that's goal is not simply maximizing employment? Surely you can imagine a scenario with two civilizations, one has 99% employment, one has 80% employment, but the people in the 99% employed society are, on average, worse off?
> As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs
Most people would not say the number of potholes they encounter or the level of park maintenance is so poor that their needs aren't being met.
I haven't done the math, but my guess is that a pothole might do hundreds of dollars worth of damage over its lifetime, maybe thousands. If society was willing to pay 1/10th of that sum per pothole to anyone willing to fill it, there'd be a lot more applicants. (Though it might lead to people making potholes on purpose, so the payment needs to depend on road health over time, not number of potholes filled.)
Well your last sentence shows exactly why it wouldn't work and so you're not really talking about "1/10th of that sum per pothole" you're talking about, I don't even know - paying random people random sums of money at arbitrary times based on overall road health?
A map, posted on the municipal or county website. You, a private citizen, bid to fill a hole. The city accepts. You upload a geostamped 'Before' picture. You are given a time window to fill the hole (often at night). You fill the hole. Upload 'After' pictures. Get paid in the next cycle.
You take a sledge hammer to the street a block over. Repeat. Profit.
You do a bad job filling the hole. Some hits it and their car breaks. They sue you and the city. The city attorneys successfully push the blame onto you since you're a contractor. You have no liability insurance because you're not a professional because that's the whole point of this thing, right? You're on the hook for the car, a few grand for a medical check-up, and a spurious mental anguish claim. You declare bankruptcy and on the way back from your last visit with your attorney, you hit another pothole and your car breaks. Full circle.
Yeah, you will fill the potholes to the limit of your abilities and the society provides for your needs. This had been tried many times and does not work because the balance of abilities and needs comes out unbounded: even if your abilities to fill potholes were greater than your needs initially, having all needs satisfied generates more needs and diminishes the ability to work. Even sending someone to poke you with a bayonet in order to have more abilities won't work because, again, the dude with the bayonet is the subject to the same abilities/needs disbalance. So it ends up with very little needs satisfied, a lot of bayonet poking and tons of waste since the ability/need balance is calculated by vibes instead of market.
I wonder how much of roads today being worse are because we have added a large amount of buried services under roadways? There are streets in my town that are a patched up messed. Thinking about it, all of those streets/the worst streets in town are ones without overhead lines.
I'd have to go through a decent chunk of the dictionary before I started referring to people who chew with their mouth open as "bastards."
> systemically bastardly things (like say heavily policing crimes of poverty while ignoring crimes of wealth)
I'm the last person I would expect to be defending police, but I think if you look at the rate of physical and property violence perpetrated by "crimes of poverty" vs. "crimes of wealth" that might have a lot more to do with it than the cop trying to decide if the victim has money or not before they do anything.
> than the cop trying to decide if the victim has money or not before they do anything.
Who said that? The cops don’t need to ”decide” to bust you based on how much money you have, the system already put them on patrol in the poorer neighborhood.
The police are too busy going after crimes of poverty to go after the crimes that impoverish people. “Crimes of wealth” do plenty of violence, it’s just laundered thru abstractions and layers of misdirection.
It's deeper than this. If you try to justify why Marijuana is schedule 1, you can't. The only reasonable explanation is "the DEA hates black Americans and poor people and wants to punish them most". That's the reasonable explanation, not the conspiracy.
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