Quote:
Originally Posted by bobman0330
I feel like the US actually has to be superior, because it manages to be a very good country despite being governed like crap. Most European countries are governed very well and they generally only manage to be around as good as the US or slightly better. QED
Plus Europe is going straight to Mad Max land just because they entered into a suboptimal currency union. We can blithely threaten to default on our debt, and only 1 rating agency even downgrades us.
I think this is overly pessimistic and cynical. The US is actually really competent in key areas. And it's, coincidentally or not, a lot of the big ticket items in the federal budget.
For instance, I mean, I feel like I'm a pretty decent critic of military conduct, but there's no question imo (I won't pretend to be an expert) that the military conducts operations of tremendous scope and complexity and does it more successfully than basically every other military, both among its contemporary peers and historically.
I bet you could also look to market signals like salaries of former mid to high level military commanders and see that they have valuable and highly sought after skills in the civilian marketplace. I remember reading that when Walt Disney was building Disneyland and Disney World, he consciously sought out former military engineers to put in key management positions on the project(s) because he felt like they were the only group of people qualified to implement giant construction projects.
I mean it gets eleventy gazillion dollars annually, and believe me when I say I don't think America sees the ROI, but if the military were a computer program, I think that's more a problem in design than execution. There's very few "bugs" in the military and the problem exists mostly between the keyboard and the chair. The American public sinks .25 cents of every federal dollar into the military and gets back a professionally run, non-political killing machine with cool death dealing toys you can send all over the world to blow **** up that answers to civilian leadership and noone really worries about internal corruption, the military shaking down its own citizens, waging a coup against democratically elected civilian leadership, etc.. Even in the Civil War, a lot of military leadership was determined via political connections and horse trading. I don't doubt there's still *some* of that, but by all accounts the post WWII American military is a pretty decent meritocracy. Given the size and scope and history of groups of people armed-to-the-teeth, that's pretty expectational.
Second example: Social Security is the largest government program in the world.
A recent poll says 80% (!!!) of voters think the program is good for the country. You can't get 80% of people to agree on anything, but they agree on that. You look at crosstabs and the popular is even more popular with people receiving benefits. I'm not trying to say the program is philosophically justified, and ldo people who get checks like the program, but that's just the point: the US federal government is running the world's largest redistribution program and it's
incredibly popular. I think that speaks to some core competencies that the money is making it's way to recipients, providing them income security in retirement (no small feat in a country with relatively high levels of poverty and economic depravity for an advanced economy), and anecdotal stories of the checks failing to get to recipients, officials stealing the money, or corruption within SSA where the monies get fed to political allies or for political purposes are exceedingly rare.
Now, someone clever will be by to be like LOL DEBT JUST WAIT, but I mean as you said, I'll take a pretty solid credit ratings, a less than 2% interest rate on federal debt, and yeah, a "look at Europe" as a pretty clear indicator the federal government does it's big ticket expenditures pretty well and the government's finances are in much much better shape than other Western countries trying to do the same ****.
I agree that the US has a dysfunctional political system but would argue that there's a good bit of actual governance America functions exceedingly well at -- there's expectations set for how power gets applied (i.e., we're gonna arm these guys and they're gonna do this stuff, or we're gonna take this money and give it to these people), and the record of performance at achieving those aims is quite good, even exceptional.
Last edited by DVaut1; 05-30-2012 at 10:28 PM.