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

To: Road Walker who wrote (24394)	7/31/2012 12:36:14 PM
From: i-node	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

My point is that government is just too damned big to be good at most things. An organization this huge cannot function well because of layer after layer of organizational structure and the bureaucracy is so thick you can't cut through it. This is a key reason it makes no sense to suggest that single payer would work in the US because it works in other countries. A country with 5 million population is more like a US state, where the government is much smaller and less bureaucratic -- you have fewer layers of bureaucracy between the top and the bottom. Our government could get more done with a fraction of the money if it were half the size it currently is.

To: Road Walker who wrote (24394)	7/31/2012 7:38:39 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Its not that government does them because they are hard (the private sector does all sorts of hard things, including doing things for the government under contract, where the government figures it will be more efficient to have the private sector do it); its that the government does them because they are public goods (non-rivalrous and non-excludable), that have strong positive externalities, and because or real and perceived conflict of interest concerns, and because of politics and political ideology. But despite all of that a lot of protection, and legal settlement, is done by the private sector (there are a lot more security guards than cops, and even counting only fairly high end guards they are quite numerous, and there are all sorts of settlement and arbitration outfits in the private sector). As for war, that's almost a matter of definition, we generally don't consider a private sector conflict to be a real war, at least not unless its huge, and government is much bigger than any private sector concerns. And to the extent that private sector organizations resolve their differences with market competition, negotiations, arbitration, etc, rather than violence, its a good thing. The fact that they don't use violence so much is of course partially do to the government acting to quash such efforts (keeping the peace is the most central role of a government and its main justification), but also do to self interest. Saying "government do war", is hardly an arguments that governments are so great, that they should do everything.