So we're going to let incompetents govern incompetently for what exists and ask them to govern competently for NEW things? How peculiar.
Believing the government to be incompetent is a self-fulfilling prophecy:
- Only the incompetent or apathetic will choose to work for government and take the hit to their personal reputation.
- Underfunding leads to underperformance which leads to perceptions of incompetence which leads to underfunding.
- True incompetence, corruption, etc. start getting ignored as just "that's how the government is," so nobody tries to fix anything.
- Those who have a financial interest in reducing the capabilities of government will "starve the beast" and make it progressively more incompetent.
There are many functions of government that, though they could always do better, make the world better than it would be in their absence: fire departments, paramedics, infrastructure management (in areas where this is actually done reasonably well), utilities, financial crimes enforcement, agricultural and pharmaceutical quality enforcement, etc.
We're already pretty far down this road of destruction of competence, so I'm not sure how to turn things around, but that doesn't mean we have to keep driving forward into the land of feudalistic anarchocapitalism.
Your argument basically boils down to "they'll do well if we just have faith in them" which is not convincing. I can see how in some instances lack of faith in public institutions compounds their failure, but it never starts with lack of faith. Nations create governments because they want them and they think they can work, if a couple generations later they no longer do, it is because the government is not functioning as intended. The incompetence precedes the pessimism, not the other way around. Negative sentiment can compound the failure, but it always begins with failure, not negative sentiment.
> Underfunding leads to underperformance which leads to perceptions of incompetence which leads to underfunding.
Incompetence leads to underfunding. If they would get their shit together I would be fine with funding them (obv not for regulating the crypto market but just in general).
Believing the government to be incompetent is a self-fulfilling prophecy:
- Only the incompetent or apathetic will choose to work for government and take the hit to their personal reputation.
- Underfunding leads to underperformance which leads to perceptions of incompetence which leads to underfunding.
- True incompetence, corruption, etc. start getting ignored as just "that's how the government is," so nobody tries to fix anything.
- Those who have a financial interest in reducing the capabilities of government will "starve the beast" and make it progressively more incompetent.
There are many functions of government that, though they could always do better, make the world better than it would be in their absence: fire departments, paramedics, infrastructure management (in areas where this is actually done reasonably well), utilities, financial crimes enforcement, agricultural and pharmaceutical quality enforcement, etc.
We're already pretty far down this road of destruction of competence, so I'm not sure how to turn things around, but that doesn't mean we have to keep driving forward into the land of feudalistic anarchocapitalism.