This will be another long post, but it is the culmination of an argument I had on reddit a day or so ago regarding the nature of the United States and whether or not it is evil. That discussion is rather complicated and something I'm not particularly interested in exploring, but a by product was a question of the functionality of government.
As with all of my overly long posts in which I type furiously in to a small white box until I lose focus, this is based on a great deal of personal observation and is only backed up by such. I may, of course, be entirely wrong, but from everything I have seen and studied, I do not think so. Unlike my other posts, this will contain a weeeee bit of conspiracy, although nothing along the lines of lizard men controlling Washington. Hint: They control Canada and parts of Zimbabwe.
Instead, this is a rant about the function of Government, and perhaps the most effective marketing campaign in human history. And its mostly happened before.
Let's take a very quick jump back to the Renaissance, but a bit before things really started to kick off. You know, just a few years after the Black Death has wiped most people out and everyone is trying to get business going because of all that sweet cash floating around.
Cities at the time, well, what they called cities, began to have a bit of a problem with all of this new activity; there really wasn't any sort of management in place at the time which allowed for effective government to exist. The Emperor had little interest in local governments, the Church was, well, it wasn't really going to do much good for cities which weren't Church property, and the Merchants didn't really care about the petty details; they just wanted to make as much profit as they could.
Local councils were, of course, woefully inadequate. They didn't have any real way to call on someone to help them out in really desperate times; there was almost no safety net for a city if industries began to go south. So this is the stage we have set for us; a world in which basic day to day functions like food prices, infrastructure management, water sanitation and even availability is essentially at 0.
What did the people lack, that we gained later on in Western history? Well, a government. Not that they didn't have rulers, or people to actually govern them, but they lacked for the most part a Government that would run the tasks which no individual could.
When you really break down what a Government is, you start to see the very basic nature of it. So let's deconstruct what a Government is supposed to be. And yes, for the sake of argument and because I am talking about the West and the U.S. in particular, I will be using the U.S. as an example.
1. The Government is supposed to protect the rights of its individual citizens. 2. The Government is supposed to regulate trade and keep the economy stable. 3. The Government is supposed to provide military protection against other cultures which threaten the existing culture. 4. The Government is supposed to handle infrastructure which cannot be reliably handled by individuals or private industry, especially services which require universal standards.
Now these are four very basic functions, and they can be handled in a variety of ways. But that's not really what we're concerned with.
Let's take a look at 4. Why this function? Well, its simple. People in the modern world need electricity for business, running water for health and safety, paved roads to get to work, property laws to know when and where to build/live, and regulations to keep society from dissolving to chaos. While private industry could in theory provide these services, they will not be universally set; Water standards need to be relatively unified across the nation, as do railroad sizes, road signs, stop lights, and other various laws which govern day to day activity.
So if you really simplify it, a Governments most basic function is to maintain infrastructure. If you strip everything else away, the service a Government provides is maintenance. Who cares what rights you have when roads are unpaved? Why regular business if it can't travel anywhere? Why provide military protection when people can't get clean water?
For quite some time the U.S. Government, and most other governments around the world, provided the infrastructure. That is no small task, mind you; roads take time to build and design, must be maintained regularly, and have to be built in a way which is in compliance with existing laws. Maintaining infrastructure is expensive and requires a rather large bureaucracy.
In the modern day U.S., infrastructure is very poorly maintained outside of major cities. Power outages are common because of the numerous failing power lines around the country, bridges are abysmally maintained, water lines are rusted and easy contaminated by the environment, and overall the very basic infrastructure people depend on to maintain their livelihood is threatened. But why?
This is where the conspiracy comes in to play. You see, people hate a few things. They hate not having the things they depend on, and they hate spending money. The former requires the latter, and because of this, infrastructure maintenance at federal levels is ultimately a detrimental platform to run on. After all, what do you think pork projects are? They're parks, new roads, powerlines, etc. Infrastructure. Don't tell anyone though, because a representative who is viewed as spending wasteful amounts of money on these "frivolous" services will be lambasted by their opponents for ruining the economy.
It is much easier to run on a moral platform, to make the fight about values rather than services. It changes the government, and politics in general, from a practical argument to an emotional, moralistic argument, and government is inherently a practical matter, not an ideological one.
Ultimately, whether or not the Government is able to determine if women can have access to birth control under medicaid is not an argument about whether or not birth control is right or wrong - or at least it shouldn't be an argument about that - but one about whether or not access to birth control is practical. What are the economic impacts? How useful will it be? What diseases will it prevent or reduce? What laws does it need to comply with? What birth control should be provided, and by which company, if it is provided at all?
Making an issue about morality, and making a moral argument the center of a campaign, is a very easy way to distract people from much more immediate issues which would require unpopular decisions to implement. The very simple fact of the matter is that our infrastructure in the U.S. is in a terrible state and almost nothing is being done to preserve it. Local governments and state governments don't have the funds to maintain the vast network which is coming under increasing strain. To really revitalize say, the railways, would require a vast federal investment and years of effort to really get it to where it needs to be. But this takes money, and its much harder to build convincing rhetoric about actually doing something useful.
Now, I am a big proponent of human rights, especially for citizens who have been historically repressed, but would it kill to have the roads near my house paved with the same asphalt? A multicolored nation is great when its the people who are from different cultures; I prefer my roads to be rather monotonous.
And I'd prefer if the construction company was regulated enough so that a collapsed pipe in 2011 didn't cost my family 18,000$ in damages. Would be neat.
You're overthinking it. A lot. For starters, the purpose of "government' (and yes, they had lots of them in the Dark Ages - feudalism is a form of government, even in Afghanistan) is to facilitate trade. That "trade" may be as simple as "I scrub your washpot and in exchange you feed me gruel" or as complex as "I provide analyses of your wars in southeast asia in exchange for currency to pay for my fancy building in Santa Monica." Your focus on infrastructure is misguided. When JP Morgan was making shit tons of money on railroads, the government was all about railroads because JP Morgan owned the government. When GM and Goodyear were making shit tons of money on cars, the government was all about roads because GM and Goodyear owned the government. Never inject morality into governance; it's never about morality, it's always about expediency. Any country's government is set precisely at the pain point where the classes are all equally unhappy; the underclass of Europe is more likely to riot than the underclass of the US so there are more social services in Europe. The overclass is more likely to shoot and torture the underclass in southeast asia so there are fewer social services in southeast asia. That simple. The issue with trains for public transport in the US is the rails are all privately-owned and the trains are all publicly-owned - it is, simply put, exactly backwards from the way you want it to run (and the way it runs everywhere else). Revitalizing the railways would really only require BNSF or one of the other freight carriers to decide it's economically feasible for them to move passenger traffic. They aren't going to do that, though, because they have monopoly over the rails (as in, Amtrak has to wait if they feel like using the tracks that day and there's no sideline). Also, don't know if you've noticed but every time the democrats are in power they invest BIG in infrastructure. You can always tell when there's a donkey in the house because the world smells like road tar. Hell, the only reason we're discussing fiber optic networks is because the Clinton administration spent shit tons of money wiring up the country in '96. Sorry 'bout your collapsed pipe. I'll wager that it was on your property. Had it been in the street it would have come out of taxes, but the hookup between you and them is your deal - you pay money, they haul off your poop.
Pipe ws underneath the strip of land just the past the sidewalk. Forget the name, but its an rea where the local government is capable of placing road signs and whatnot. The bigger issue was that our garage was not built to code, and the pipe wasn't placed with any ways to handle even mild flooding (the 2011 hurricane only barely hit us. I forget its name. I just woke up, don't hate.) The floor of the garage actually collapsed on us;, it sunk a foot and a half off the side of the house because the earth underneath it was just compressed earth. What was supposed to happen was earth would be compressed, then gravel and a small layer of sand would be layed down to prevent anything outside of a much more significant flood from destroying the garage. There was no mention of it not being up to code by the previous owner when we bought it, and we havven't contacted them in 13 years at this point so its unlikely we could find out if they knew. We looked in to suing the state for obvious reasons, and found that we couldn't because similar cases had been dismissed. Not enough for a class action, unfortunately, but enough to be irritating. I suppose my biggest gripe with the situation was that it sort of the in the face of the idea that a government will enforce its own laws. Governments need to enforce these regulations because there's no feasible way for me to do so, and my government did nothing of the sort. Regarding infrastructure investment: I live in Pennsylvania. The only roads which get worked on here are main roads which don't need it. My town specifically (Lansdale) doesn't do shit for its roadworks, has ridiculously high rents set by the landlords for businesses and nobody to oppose them, and a monopoly over electricity which costs businesses in the town 32/month vs. 7 with PECO. So when you talk about infrastruture developments from any federal government, it sounds like a fairy tale. I haven't seen my area, including the towns around me, change beyond maybe adding and losing a few stores in the past decade. Except they paved 3 parallel main roads one time because fuck needing to go places on a direct route, right?
Ahhh - so in other words, the pipe burst in the easement the city has against your property. Because of construction that an inspection to your property didn't reveal. Again, that sucks. It does not a conspiracy make, however. I'm sure that if an inspection had caught the work, laws would have been enforced. Otherwise the city is on the hook and the city doesn't like spending money (as you've seen). The only roads that ever get worked on are the main roads, because the main roads are the ones with the most traffic on them. But if that doesn't work for a lot of people, they set up shop elsewhere and suddenly Lansdale doesn't have the tax base to do what needs to be done and things change so they can attract business back. Again - facilitating trade. "Fans of sausage and politics should not watch either being made." - Otto von Bismarck
Have you ever read any of Richard Pipes's writing? He argues that the purpose of government is to protect private property, and that facilitating trade is one embodiment of that role. The different forms of government, then, arise based on whose property is being protected, whether it be a patrimonial system, in which the king owns all, or a liberal democracy in which many citizens may own property of some sort.
I have read two of his books, Property and Freedom, and The Russian Revolution. They are both pretty fascinating. I saw you recently had a baby, so I would suggest starting with Property and Freedom; The Russian Revolution is a volume that requires a whole lot of spare time to digest. Anyway P&F really gives some insight into why the Soviet Union happened in the first place, while Western countries by and large developed into liberal democracies, so its definitely worth reading.
I've not read it, so I don't really have an opinion. What I can say based on the two that I've read is that he is way more gifted as a writer--independent of his erudition, which is also top notch--than most academic writers I've come across. Given that, I'm sure most of his books are worthwhile.
FWIW: The "most effective marketing campaign" has been, and continues to be the one the christians are waging globally. IMO. Pretty solid ROI.