2. Point to those, and say "See? it doesn't work. We should get private sector to provide those services, as the private sector is much cheaper and more efficient."
3. Hand out contracts to your buddies.
4. Years later, down the road, another sitting government will revert back to the original state - due to the private contracts turning out to be much more expensive than anticipated, and delivering sub-par service.
5. Next pro-privatization government is elected, goto step (1).
The end game seems to be a state of permanent competitive insecurity for most of the population, with fatal consequences for dissent/bad luck/mistakes, while everything is owned and run for the benefit of a handful of aristocrats who exist in vapid self-indulgent splendour.
If this seems exaggerated, consider that most people are already only a few pay checks and/or a major health crisis away from homelessness, bankruptcy, and starvation.
Wild idea: the problem is that society as a whole cannot decide whether given area should be managed by a private company, or the government, therefore it oscillates between these two states. We could avoid this problem by having an economic system that enforces smooth transition, so that instead of flickering between "private company" and "branch of the government" with each change causing disruptions, we'd experience gradual, less noticable changes. In other words, instead of having same laws apply to all companies, have different laws for different-sized companies, making them naturally grow into branches of government as they expand, and return to private as they shrink.
But we do know what sort of things government is needed for. Public goods for example are generally better when handled by government. Private sector can help of course but they don’t like free riders.
by society you mean "a few dozen very rich men vs. a bulk of america". But yes, I agree. The former can work in the shadows and pay others to scheme for them, and then eventually the sheer will of people waking up pushes back against it.
I don't know how to smoothly transition that. it relies on a properly educated citizenship who knows their rights. But again, those very rich men spent decades decimating that.
It will probably be another 15-20 years before we see the pendulum swing back for education unfortunately since we're still in the fuck around part of FAFO. It will take at least another generation of poor performance and educational outcomes before we realize that the problem isn't public education but rather the lack of investment in early childhood development.
There's 3a which is "cherry-pick customers / clients to make it appear that privatized services are more cost-effective than public services that are by default providing services." Picking and choosing one's customers already makes it an invalid comparison if one wants to talk about value.
But essentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies or moving goalposts is one of the oldest tricks in the book by dishonest folks of any ideological alignment. In an alternate universe where socialism / central planning is the default ideology if we wanted to make as unfair of a comparison demonizing private sector we'd have asked half of Silicon Valley companies to forego VC funding, not allow them to do M&A, demand that they be able to serve the general public for even the most obscure of problems, and so forth. That sets them up for failure out of the gate by measuring them against the criteria of the status quo and eliminates any of their advantages over a centralized planning system. And in fact, a large part of these ridiculous restrictions is exactly why NGOs are structured to fail to make much progress on any of the important societal problems they work on.
Mostly because the richest people keep stealing money through lobbying for tax cuts.
And its' happening right now. House passed a 900b dollar cut to Medicaid to fund the latest cuts. If you want to pay off deficits you need your biggest contributors to pay their share. But no one who harps about the deficit seems to want to talk about that.
I already don't have a full time job. I've used a bit of that job search time to participate in protests and call my reps.
>Even if you are the only one, do it anyway.
It'd be useless. What we lack in power we have in numbers. Protests only work as a collective action.a collective action that can kick out bad reps and replace them with ones who will do their jobs.
Any suggestions? Seems that some of my triggers may be happening already. Perhaps we can go with:
1. Global economic collapse
2. WW III
3. Major Pandemic
4. Martial Law declared (might be too late)
5. Elections cancelled
6. All of the above.
The actual quote is the other way around. What evidence does the parent have for intentions to harm instead of just making stupid cuts, completely inline with their well documented history of simplistic, sledgehammer solutioneering ?
It's hard to take a war on public health measures, public-interest science institutions like NOAA, and public education as evidence of good faith.
It's not as if they're starting where the obvious bloat is (defence, fossil fuel subsidies...) and working back to the rounding errors.
It's entirely predictable supremacism - the doctrine that wealth and skin colour define virtue, and government in the public interest, which interferes with the "freedom" to abuse and exploit inferiors for profit, is an unnatural abomination.
Simplistic, sledgehammer solutioneering is an intention to harm. Randomly firing entire teams whose director feels they are "the 'gold standard' of civic technologists" produces immediate and knowable damage. Nobody who wanted government technology to function well would do such a thing.
Is it possible that they have some other, important objective which can only be achieved by degrading the quality of government technology? In principle. But I haven't seen any explanation of what that objective could possibly be, and I have seen people with arguments for why they think it should not be easy to get access to NOAA weather data and it should not be easy to file your taxes with the IRS.
>What evidence does the parent have for intentions to harm instead of just making stupid cuts, completely inline with their well documented history of simplistic, sledgehammer solutioneering ?
It's not vandalism either. And the goal isn't that the government not function, per se. It's that all government function must be for the benefit of the rulers. 18F was popular, effective, and not remotely beholden to the Trump administration (in fact they were most closely associated with the Obama administration). They had to go, not because we want them to do a bad job but because them doing a good job undermined the administration.
To wit, we already had a word for this: this is a purge.
In my experience, wetlands are drained to destroy natural ecosystems so that real estate developers can pave over the land for their own personal gain. Makes a perfect metaphor for the current situation.
But alas, the propagandists have been too effective at capturing that term to mean destroying the “deep state” (whatever that means at any given moment).
Draining the wetlands, straightening rivers is apt enough.
Provided people understand just why these are bad ideas that increase flood damage, savagely reduce biodiversity, remove buffers against storm surges, destroy filters that capture wastes and toxins.
