Comment by sergiomattei 18 hours ago
What bothers me is the double standard.
When the public asks for fully publicly-owned railways, universal healthcare, or any basic social safety assurances—“socialism”.
When a megacorporation struggles, immediately to the rescue.
Is like the country is not already collapsing due to lack of social services compared to the supposed enemy which already has higher lifespan while having 10x lower gdp per capita.
Not a serious problem in the same sense that a military conflict would be. Different categories and different concerns.
> Bailouts aren't following some rules of fairness
And people wonder why populism came back. Huge transfers of wealth aren't about 'fairness', its about preventing greater economic problems that the people who received the bailout say will happen if they don't get bailed out.
At the end of the day, this line of thought is going to fuck over the country far more than any depression would.
That’s fine. But when the gov is picking winners and losers, that not a free market. What it is, it is. But it’s not a free market based system.
One big difference is management control. People feel that government administered services tend to have poor management and citizen services more often than not. One big example is the DMV since almost every has experience dealing with it, long queue times are almost universal because no one gives a crap and it's very hard to fire a government employee. Or the passport issuance, or applying for permits. Or unemployment benefits, the list goes on and on.
Imagine if the DMV and passport services had even the possibility of competition like a private company has. You bet all of a sudden the service would get much faster and better and with fewer mistakes and red tape with the same or fewer number of employees. Or someone would set up a competitor and imagine how many people would even pay extra just to not waste several hours of their time.
It's tax payer money so there is a lot more waste than even at big private companies. For example, the costs to just administer and operate the social security administration(not including any money paid out to recipients) is $15 billion dollars with a big B. There is no incentive for anyone to save the tax payer any money and there would be a huge pushback from govt contractors, unions and employeees. See how much hate DOGE gets for even proposing cuts or higher efficiencies.
Any large IT project in the government in almost any country and at any goverment costs huge amounts while not returning much value if any. Look at the state and costs of local metro stations and trains in almost any city.
That's interesting example to choose, as I've actually heard often that the Social Security administration is an example of an efficient government administration.
For example, a quick Google search shows administrative overhead as around 0.5% of benefits: https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/top-ten-facts-...
Just one instance.
https://fedscoop.com/problem-project-threatens-progress-soci...
> The program, called the Disability Case Processing System, or DCPS, was designed to improve case processing and enhance customer service. But six years and $288 million later the program has “delivered limited functionality and faced schedule delays as well as increasing stakeholder concerns
For the main system they're still using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.
> See how much hate DOGE gets for even proposing cuts or higher efficiencies.
I don't think many people believed DOGE was ever intended to improve government efficiency in any real sense.
Well, my local DMV is much more efficient and friendly than the private health insurance company I have to deal with.
But part of that is lack of competition. I can't really switch to a different insurance company, because the one I am with is heavily subsidized by my employer.
I switched away from AT&T. You even keep your number. Switching govt services not an option unless you take more extreme measures.
> USPS has also been great overall
USPS is an independent agency which is funded by its own fees charged to users, not taxpayer money. It's not like the other agencies.
From Wiki:
> The USPS is often mistaken for a state-owned enterprise or government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak) because it operates much like a business
It's also far from a monopoly unlike most other govt agencies and has competition in the form of UPS, Fedex, DHL, Amazon etc.
So it's not surprising that it runs better, if it loses user fees, it directly affects the bottomline and thus would have to downsize, no blank check from the taxpayer like other agencies have.
> I switched away from AT&T. You even keep your number. Switching govt services not an option unless you take more extreme measures.
I can vote for a politician to fix the government services. And the local politicians know that keeping the government running well enough is needed to be re-elected.
I have zero leverage on AT&T.
Some services can be government-operated or private. Trash collection is one of them, for example. I lived in many cities, and municipal trash collection companies were always better and not any more expensive.
> I can vote for a politician to fix the government services. And the local politicians know that keeping the government running well enough is needed to be re-elected
That is one issue among several reasons to pick a politician. Also politicians have limited powers to fire non-performers which gets bogged down in the court system to fire just one person.
> I have zero leverage on AT&T.
People can switch away easier from companies, it happens all the time, companies lose and gain customers all the time. Bad or mediocre service has killed many companies, the effect is far greater than on governments because they get to fund themselves from you even if you don't like or want them. Govt is the ultimate monopoly.
And BTW, I agree that Social Security overhead is unacceptable. It should be privatized and increased to at least $500 billion to be comparable with health insurance companies.
It's not acceptable at all to make private companies look bad.
If it was a company it'd have failed already.
> The program, called the Disability Case Processing System, or DCPS, was designed to improve case processing and enhance customer service. But six years and $288 million later the program has “delivered limited functionality and faced schedule delays as well as increasing stakeholder concerns
https://fedscoop.com/problem-project-threatens-progress-soci...
And that's just one instance.
Can you imagine raising $288 million from VCs for a software application while delivering so little?
But taxpayer money? Free and easy money to keep wasting coz no one cares. Tragedy of the commons.
For the main system they're also using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.
Startup companies blow through hundreds of millions of VC dollars with little to show for it all the time. Theranos raised $700 million for a technology that never worked. Plenty of others wasted hundreds of millions building half-baked products that nobody wanted or that made no business sense. Remember Quibi?
> Can you imagine raising $288 million from VCs for a software application while delivering so little?
What? You're imagining VCs caring about pizza money? Should I mention, perhaps, the AOL-TimeWarner merger? Or maybe AT&T buying DirecTV for $50B and essentially giving it away for $8B?
Heck, I was a part of an utterly failed project with a $150m budget (in 2005), in a large European company.
> For the main system they're also using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.
And? They haven't missed a single payment day in all their existence, moving data between multiple types of media. While working with staff levels that won't even qualify as "skeleton" in plenty of companies.
Bailouts aren't following some rules of fairness, they're for specific reasons like preventing greater economic problems (2008) or national security (probably Intel). You might disagree that those are the best ways to address those risks but that's why we elect the government to make those decisions and act on them instead of letting the country collapse - which is arguably more important than social services which won't really matter if there's no money to fund them or the country has been taken over by some hostile enemy.