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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (13762)	3/2/2010 2:48:13 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

Its smaller in terms of government employee counts, not so much by other methods. The other method being $'s of course. And those increased $'s are going to the private sector. 1 - That's not the only other method (and I'm not just talking about different ways to measure the people and dollar count), there is also the (harder to quantify) extent of regulation and legislation and government control, there is the amount of jobs the government tries to do, the amount of property it owns, etc. 2 - The dollars are being spent by the government. Its that implementation by the private sector is often seen as more efficient even for government run activities. "Often seen as more efficient" I was being overly mild. Nearly universally seen as more efficient for many of the activities, even by the government itself. I don't think anyone with any influence is seriously proposing that the government directly take over road building rather than contracting it out. There would be no iPhones without Apple. As I said " Other people design and market them". The Other people in question are people working for Apple. If that contractor didn't exist they would use another. Which would mean someone else made the iPhones. You can put it this way Apple "made the iPhone". The contractors "make the iPhones". Weak central governments (yes low tax you need revenue to have a strong government) You need revenue to have a strong central government, but not high tax rates. Low tax rates != weak government. Most of what government does has little to do with infrastructure (and a lot of the infrastructure it does make isn't really public goods, that are important and wouldn't be created without the government involvement). Most of what it does is effectively a net cost to the economy. (Defense is a cost, but arguably one like insurance, where your protecting against not being able to handle risks, transfer payments are the biggest part of the government, and they are a cost, much of the regulation is a cost well beyond the actual budgetary cost of creation of the regulation). And even the highly productive parts of government activity, still fit within the parameters of my earlier comment. Less developed economies can't afford them. They may be productive, but they require an upfront cost that poorer economies can afford to pay to the same extent as richer economies. It's not brain surgery. Its also not a very accurate description of reality.