"All governments are incompetent... "

From the tax and spend thread.

Why are governments incompetent though?

They're not really.

The fact that I have an education, and the very fact that I'm existing in this nation-state, means that government isn't wholly incompetent.

Government is as competant and able as society allows them to be, since they are merely the enacting arm OF that society. If the government is incompetant, thats either because of design or the society has multiple governing mechanisms and thus the government itself is superfluous.

Managing a massive ass country is hard. The competency comes in all the things we take for granted...like everything not blowing up at once.

The shit that seeps through is what we see though.

Because governments are run by people picked by the people.

From the original thread:

Government does plenty right. It also does plenty wrong. I focus on the wrongs because "right" is supposed to be taken as a given.

And no, the fact that I'm alive and kicking is owed to my parents, and I detest any notion to the contrary.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:08:00 PM by USAF713

Exactly. I doubt a group of us could manage a city.

Why?

Because citizens know jack shit about government.

Yes, I realise that. But the fact that your existence is contining is due to government efforts to indirectly protect you. e.g. safety laws.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:07:42 PM by Inhopelessguy

Before discussing whether governments are competent or not, we need to first define what criteria is used to measure a government's competence.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:09:20 PM by nightwyrm_zero

Well, the US Federal government is pretty much the poster child of incompetence atm.

edit: The Belgians dont even have a Federal government atm yet they are functioning.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:11:52 PM by whaleofyournightmare

No, because not all humans are incompetent, or at the very least, not all the time.

Competent can either be defined as "doing what the people want, as intended" (so, say, the people vote to eliminate drug use, and the government enacts it in such a way that actually does this) and/or defined as "doing what the contract establishing it say it's supposed to do."

A combination of both being preferable...

Its because we are putting petty politics and elections and oneupmanship over actually running the god damn country.

We're pretty decent at that when we try!

edited 21st Sep '11 2:12:27 PM by Thorn14

Compared to what exactly? We have to compare the fedgov to a gov't of similar scale.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:12:58 PM by FFShinra

It looks incompetent because nobody reports on when the government is actually doing its job properly, so you only hear about the it when there's incompetence, corruption, or something controversial going on. I'm pretty sure it's on the whole at least as competent as the private sector. Not that that says much given my opinion of the competence of the private sector.

Fine, compared to the Indian government the USA one sucks.

Because India is the model of a uniformly well-done First World nation with no problems whatsoever, am I right?

... and the Indians don't have much faith in their 'democracy', so y'know...

It's as elitist - if not moreso - than Western ones.

But, they have UHC.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:18:28 PM by Inhopelessguy

@ FF Shinra:

If you're talking about the USA — ahem, you've got China and Russia, which are hardly shining examples of competant (democratic) Government...

Would a smaller country be better, as there are more likely to be a wider selection of countries to compare competancies with?

Or am I being too Scientific here?

And knowing the Indians, Bureaucratic as hell as well as using proceedures first used c.1898 without any update...

Indian Bureaucracy has hardly got a good reputation.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:21:13 PM by Greenmantle

You can't have safety without a community, you can't have a community without law, you can't enforce law without a government (if you have a community larger than say, 1000 people).

Not all governments are incompetent, that's just ridiculous. Very few governments are incompetent, and when a government is incompetent long enough, there's either a revolt or an invasion.

Case in point: Libya. Gaddafi was a terrible, terrible person, and pretty inept at governing. His people revolted (admittedly after a few decades), and he's gone now.

Case in point #2: The United States. Seriously, it's not that bad, compared to what it could be. The reason that the American colonies became a world power after their revolution, instead of French Indochina or something, was because of our government. It works, people. Sure, there's a spate of bad senators and such every now and again, but those elections are the fault of the American Populace, not the Government.

You guys are all making my point. Compared to governments of similar scale, the US is doing just fine.

"Comparatively decent" isn't actually good, however.

I don't give a damn about relatives, I care about absolutes, and in the absolute, most governments are abysmally inept at many facets of what they do, and/or one bad election away from being at that point...

Exactly.

USAF, you're a pretty damn lucky guy, living in America. At least your government cares about you. The Indian government has no understanding of its poor, and other 'democracies' are similar.

Absolutes in the way you are applying them are incompatible with government, because government serves society which, by nature, isn't absolute either unless their friggin Spartans. Thus, relativity is necessary in measuring how good a government is or not. What you call incompetence may not be so.

EDIT-

About this "India's democracy sucks" business, I'd like to comment...the individual states have more power than the Central Government, so any local issues are their fault, not Delhi's. Further, the scale of humanity it has to govern within the space it governs does figure in to it more than most states. And it is relatively better than all the other governments in the area that started out the same way. So give em some credit....

edited 21st Sep '11 2:40:05 PM by FFShinra

USAF, there is no absolute form of government. Government is a concept. You don't get that many absolute concepts, and social concepts (like government) are pretty impossible to define in absolute terms.

~looks at Tea Party trying to destroy welfare and institute self-contradictory overt Objectivist/Christian Fundamentalist system~

Right...

Not necessarily. Morality is relative, but incompetence is not.

If I am the only one who government answers too, and I say, for example, to kill everyone, and not everyone else is dead, then the government has not completed its task. Incompetence is not about the task to be accomplished, but how well it's accomplished.

The Tea Party isn't that powerful, they're just attention whores. The major parties are decent enough.

The Tea Party isn't the government, though. That said, they are incompetent at running the government, but that's at least in part because they'd rather destroy it.