Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff? Pay them competitive wages. If they're corrupt, prosecute the corruption.
I feel like these discussions always devolve from "a government is doing a thing badly" → "governments always do things badly" → "governments should stop doing things". But governments are basically the only party that can act in the best interest of citizens rather than shareholders.
So, I would much prefer "a government is doing a thing badly" → "here are ways we could fix it". This should be perfectly achievable. Of course, no bureaucracy—public or private—will ever be perfectly efficient. That doesn't mean it can't be better, or produce a net good.
Also, I do think people tend to miss all the successful things governments fund, like science research.
> But governments are basically the only party that can act with the well being of citizens, as opposed to shareholders, in mind.
Founders that hasn't gone public yet and sold out are the only ones. The government has already sold out to shareholders, at least in USA.
And no its not just "hire good people", its not just "raise wages". What happens if you raise wages is that the useless people get more money, since the ones who decide who to hire are still bad at hiring, so them raising wages without hiring better people is also a form of corruption.
In the end you need to do a deep cleanse to fix it, there are no easy fixes. Root out all plants from all interest groups, everyone that has been bribed via lobbyism money etc, in the entire government...
> And no its not just "hire good people", its not just "raise wages". What happens if you raise wages is that the useless people get more money, since the ones who decide who to hire are still bad at hiring, so them raising wages without hiring better people is also a form of corruption.
Why do you think this doesn't happen outside the government?
> government doing badly -> government always do things badly -> government should stop doing things
Well, I don't think government does ALL things badly, so this is clearly not the case. But the NGO fraud loop is now extremely well established. The thing is none of these programs existed until pretty recently. And before this time in history, we had two mostly co-existent parties in power. Now it seems like specific people will do or allow fraud all the way to the top. We also have bills like "AB 2624" that will make it harder to even find fraud. If our government is behaving this way, I find it best to cut it off from even being allowed to do it.
Go back to roads, police and safety, not funding for alphabet causes.