The US political economy is *amazingly* clientelistic, thanks andrew jackson... that's one reason the tax code is so complicated... most countries are willing to do at least a little bit by way of universal, unqualified, non-means-tested citizen benefits
Conversation
The general social contract in the US is -- we will help you for your specific shit, if you submit to a huge political circus of other people sitting in judgment of your life choices because we don't trust the state to do so
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the reason we have to endure an annoyingly partisan and 10-levels-of-incompetence discourse (white belt to black belt) on every damn thing is that every damn thing is for a specific group that genpop has to weigh in on with varying degrees of compromised judgment
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something something polyglot persistence microservices vetocracy
it's a deep architectural equilibrium...
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I think all of military spending should be considered a kind of non-universal taxpayer funded benefit -- politically distributed boondoggle jobs programs
The SLS vs. SpaceX comparison is stark. The former is almost pure pork.
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In a way, the US backdoors direct democracy into representative democracy republic structure. Due to 6 levels of veto from urban-local to federal, and this non-universal benefits bias, everything is effectively a direct democracy referendum even if not formally so
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ballot measures are just a way to do directly what congress does more indirectly when it does manage to pass anything or what executive actions manage to sneak in as end runs... "direct democracy" compromises based on sentimental discourse signals and people calling in to reps
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both are kinda terrible... I'm with fukuyama... just commit to having an actual strong state, instead of having a strong non-universal-benefits administration vetocratic mess...
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this particular pattern of distrust of government doesn't actually get you less government, merely worse government that proceeds in fits and starts via ungainly bundles of compromises with bits and pieces for everybody, doled out piecemeal by a chaotic system
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There is a sort of wonderful premium return you can enjoy when you drive distributional overhead to zero by making something universal somehow, but in the US of course even when you achieve that, clientelism chips away at it
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Two examples are universal schooling and the postal service...we'll never know if either can work because clientelistic-cronyist "privatization" operates continuously to screw them up
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One that used to work: national weather service until that henhouse was handed over to a fox for profit
One that works, for now, is GPS
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Clientelism -- where politics operates by making special-treatment "spoils" promises to supporters as the basis for victory -- is a kind of very inefficient market. Worst of both market-based and state-based economic coordination. Pick one or the other. The middle is bad.
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