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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (367859)	1/22/2008 12:27:47 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1576858

Our federal government is huge and doesn't change easily. Elect the best president ever and he can only make changes at the margin. The same goes for a new congress. The general incentives politicians face to support special interests doesn't change. The incentives politicians face to try to increase their power by having the federal government do more doesn't change. The same two political parties have been dominant since the civil war. Yes the parties themselves have changed but only slowly. The bureaucracy turns over slowly, and new people in it face many of the same incentives. The political lobbying groups and special interest groups don't change often or quickly. Ideological ideas and ideas about political philosophy and the relative proportion of people who have the ideas change very slowly. The next presidential and congressional elections aren't going to change any of that no matter what the result. In a way that's good. The inertia, also keeps really bad things from happening. But it does mean you can't expect massive positive change from electing a new president or a new congress. I don't think politicians are mostly evil, or that corporations are, or are run by, saints. But they respond to the incentives that they face. Politicians have incentives to be seen as doing something, even when doing nothing may be the smarter policy. They face the incentive to help out special interests, even at the expense of the country as a whole. They face the incentive to expand the federal government because it gives them more power. Corporations profit by serving their customer. Sure they have negative incentives as well. If they can scam their customers their short term profits might be higher. But if they don't serve their customers well they lose their customers, unless they don't face competition. So they have the incentive to get trade restrictions and benefits from the government so they don't have to work hard to serve their customers well. Since politicians have the incentive to seek support by giving out such favors you have a bad situation if you have an activist government. Reduce the amount government gets involved, and you make the incentives, and the results, better all around. The problem is most of the major players have an incentive for government to get involved.