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I agree with you on an individual level, and that it is unhealthy to care too much about someone around you getting a break that you didn't get yourself... But that breaks down really quickly on a societal level. Our society is organized around at least a semblance of fairness. So for example even if you pay your taxes and you probably wouldn't mind if your neighbor got away with not paying as much as you do... but you'd probably be pretty pissed if every other person you know just does not pay anything and gets away with it. It breaks down confidence in the system.

In morocco for example, that feeling of unfairness just leads to people doing everything to make their situation better when they get the occasion, because everyone does it. It got slowly but surely worse and worse, and we are now left with a population that is much more cynical and disillusioned than it was a few decades ago.

Just as an example, if your building permit is stuck in approval hell and the local official offers you to pay 1000dirhams to speed the process up, does it really hurt anyone? No, but it makes the entire process seem futile for everyone else, even if it maybe shouldn't.

I think that's a bit similar to the student loan debate, and if anything the loan forgiveness looks much much more shameless to me. Because at the end of the day, college graduates are statistically doing better than a lot of the people that are asked to foot the bill. The proposal is also completely self serving, with almost 0 benefits (a supposed cash injection to the economy isn't one) to anyone else. It's so contrary to everything that is being pushed for right now too, because it's just giving an already privileged population another privilege that is usually very rarely granted.




Yes, but that's the opposite problem: a dysfunctional bureaucracy will tend to become more dysfunctional over time until people have had enough of it and reverse the direction of the spiral usually by main force. Morocco could be a very nice country on all fronts but it would take an entirely different government including a significant part of the civil service to start realizing that potential.

France would not be the France that we know today without the French Revolution, which both remade France and put the rest of Europe's royals on notice that they were expendable in the most literal sense. Get rid of the parasites and suddenly you'll find there is budget for all kinds of improvements.




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