Big Government: Can't it be made to work and be efficient?

[Republicanguy]

The is no single definition of "best." In capitalism, I get to choose what's best for me. In socialism, what's best for me isn't ever a consideration. The only consideration will be some other person's defintion of what's best for society.

It's slavery, under a different name. There are advantages to slavery, too. But it is a form of socialism, and as such is pure evil.

Certainly teamwork is important, but only when the team is motivated by their own interests. That's why communes work, but socialism as a system of government doesn't.

Oh yeah,

"In socialism, what's best for me isn't ever a consideration." that is a thoughtless statement. I find the idea of limited government dangerous. May be its all just a pipe dream. Just like the whole idea of non-intervention.

Essentially the purpose of humanity is a hunter gatherer society, work work work. End of.

 

[Henry Rogue]

Hi all, so I've read a lot of Ron Paul's work and watched many of his lectures on Youtube and I really love his views. Ron Paul, and many others, all say that government is extremely inefficient and every year we see that things run by government, like public education, all become more expensive every year and at the same time, every year the quality goes down and from what I can see, this is true.

My question is: Isn't it possible to make big government work? Couldn't you just make it so that government workers would be heavily penalised and fired if they were inefficient or even penalised using corporal punishment? I was just watching Stargate SG-1 and in it there is a character named Anubis who is an emperor and if his servants aren't successful they're heavily punished.

There is a guy on this forum who wants to inject the market into government. He doesn't give unlimited choices, but his idea is a hell of a lot better than your idea.
First of all, you ignore that the emperor is inefficient. How can the emperor possibly know what my wants are? How can he know what my wants will be tomorrow when I can't be positive what they will be tomorrow.

I know, it's silly to bring up this, but it's what occurred to me. It just seems like there are some positives to having a big government and just saying that 'gummit is always bad' is painting the topic with a really broad brush.

Is, "slavery is always bad" painting with a really broad brush. What does it matter to the slave if his master is, but one or many?

The Soviet Union was able to do some things really well and was able to compete with the USA despite having a smaller economy with which to draw resources from. It achieved great things in the fields of the military, sport research and the space race.

You are comparing one form of statism to another form of statism. One is a centrally plan economy, which takes it's ques from another economy. In the second, the state manipulates the economy and is only marginally better. What you ignore or can't see is that resources have been diverted from society to the state, creating malinvestment and a push beyond the production possibilities frontier.

By the way, what other things did the USSR do well?

Murder, rob, torture. Pretty much the same things this government does well. Socialism is a misnomer. Society is not the same thing as state. A better term would be Statist, try that on, see if it fits.

 

[Feeding the Abscess]

This has to do with the calculation problem. Because the economy (especially the modern one, but it is also true of all economies) is so endlessly complex, it is impossible for a central authority to determine what is best for it. Genius level investors and creators fail regularly because of the nature of business - and they are typically dealing with tiny, infinitesimally small fractions of the economy, not the insane parameters of the full monty. Even if you took every genius leader of all segments of industry and economy and placed them in the government, they'd fail spectacularly, and their inferior replacements in the private sector would be producing at a lesser capacity, multiplying the effect of the damage.

Copied from one of the OP's other threads.

 

[Henry Rogue]

This is a Tupolev Tu-4.

It is a part-for-part copy of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

I had to fix that. The rest is spot on. The B-29 was my historical focus at a young age.