
Why does the government always get it wrong? - badboy
https://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/193/
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eli_gottlieb
It doesn't "always get it wrong", and in fact _most_ government functions work
just fine. Government, like IT infrastructure, becomes invisible when it
functions well.

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wfrick
Agreed. People love to focus on the failures of government while ignoring its
role in developing technologies we rely on every day.

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nirvana
This article is pretty good and identifies a number of the reasons, but I
think there's a couple broader reasons it misses, that effect government's
actions in other areas as well:

1\. Government's incentives are misaligned. Politicians want to get re-
elected. Bureaucrats want to preserve their jobs or expand their fiefdoms.
Both of these desires promote the passage of more laws, of ever greater
complexity, and a conservative "you can't blame me" approach. Often this means
government ends up regulating things- like the internet- that it doesn't
understand, with regulations that make no sense, or make things worse.

2\. There's no real check on government. In theory elections are a check, but
the government conducts the elections. This means that in every election the
choices you can make are going to be limited by the choices the government
finds acceptable. This manifests itself in such a variety of ways-- from the
republican party changing rules on a day to day basis to thwart the Ron Paul
campaign, to election fraud, to the fact that "disband the government" is
never an option on any ballot. Naturally, of course the other branches that
are supposed to be checks are filled with politicians or partisans put there
by the parties they're supposedly keeping an eye on.

3\. Once government gets in the regulation business, corruption is highly
incentivized and never punished. For instance, if you're regulating the
internet, you're highly incentivized to listen to the big media producers like
the MPAA. Nobody is going to jail for passing legislation advised on by the
MPAA and getting a campaign contribution from the MPAA. But is this not, at
its base, corruption? Regulations in all industries tend to favor large
corporations (who can afford to keep people on staff to manage compliance and
who tend to influence the legislation to cause difficulty for would be
competitors) and hurt smaller companies (for whom compliance hits the bottom
line harder.)

4\. Government simply doesn't have the bandwidth to address all these issues.
Over time, government wants to regulate more and more and more areas, and
there's really almost no stopping them (especially in the UK where they have
less controls than the US's constitution.) There's thus never going to be
enough bureaucracy to do everything that needs to be done, and in the end you
often can't even get the government to answer questions about the
regulations-- which are themselves contradictory. Politicians want to pass a
law and move on, but bureaucrats don't want to ever get caught saying the
wrong thing, and nobody has enough budget to provide the services they should
to the industry they are regulating.

