
Governments will always suck but we need them - dumbfoundded
https://www.atlassquats.com/post/governments-will-always-suck-but-we-increasingly-need-them
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trail-system
This article approaches a few correct points on some very obvious ideas while
saying a lot of other things that I find crazy.

 _My personal experiences with the government have been either frustrating,
inefficient, meaningless, or detrimental. At some point, you inevitably start
questioning why such a large government exists and why we need it._

The authors is listing words with very specific negative emotional subtext. It
barely makes sense in the context of the sentence.

 _" The first thing to understand about governments is that governments and
corporations are exactly the same. Both are just groups of people trying to
create value in some market."_

The first thing to understand is generalities can be the death of any
reasonable perspective.

The authors use of language betrays the mistake of personifying the government
as a cohesive and singular entity.

The truth is that most governments exist as an ecosystem for many different
parts to cooperate for various reasons. A very large amount of the people
within that ecosystem are genuinely passionate about being able to work for
the public good and do a fantastic job of it. A large amount of people within
the same ecosystem do not care and take advantage of their civil service role
as a means of personal/commercial benefit. Now what about the people in
between these archetypes?

The actual "thing" is too varied and complex for almost any generality to be
usefully applied.

~~~
dumbfoundded
The point of generalities is to be able to reason about things too complicated
to fully describe. Whether or not you think a specific generalization,
framing, or model is a good or useful one is completely up for debate.
Denouncing the idea of generalities doesn't give any room to reason about
anything complicated.

Saying something is too complicated and varied to reason about is an
indictment against all of science. Reality is fractally complicated yet we
still manage. Physics is an approximation of reality. Chemisty is an
approximation of physics. Biology is an approximation of chemistry. No model
is perfect.

In my opinion, understanding government as a monopoly in the business of
violence provides a useful framework.

1\. It's generalizable. Monopolizing violence over its citizens is the common
factor between every government. From North Korea to China to the US to
Norway, all governments maintain the absolute and unrivaled power to exert
violence over their citizens. I cannot personally find any counterexample.

2\. We can apply existing research. Modeling governments as businesses in a
specific industry enables to use research about how markets and businesses
work. This whole post is essentially an argument to change macroeconomic
modeling. Instead of treating the government as some separate special entity,
we can simply existing macroeconomics models by treating the government as yet
another business.

3\. It's simple.

