Done. I also removed the author name from the title. For the most part, we keep author names out of HN titles. It's a trick I learned from pg for keeping the focus on content rather than personalities. Of course there are always exceptions.
Thanks again, no need for the author in the title, who has seen his documentaries will notice his name instantly on the article, if not his style will be obvious in the first video.
Has anybody ever trusted people in authority? During the bootlegger era, it was common for public officials to be quite openly on the take. Can you even imagine,[1] something like that being tolerated today?
What is different,[2] now is that trust has been eroded in institutions. I think people in my parents generation (born in the early 1950's) still believe that government more or less acts in the best interests of the people.[3] I think that belief is a lot less common in my generation, and I'm quite past the age of generic rebelliousness (born mid 1980's).
What strikes me as interesting are two related facts:
1) Those who are the most distrustful of government tend to skew libertarian; but
2) Many of the biggest changes in the U.S. since 1970 have been in the direction of deregulation, increased emphasis on markets, and smaller government.[4]
Measures that should be increasing trust in the system are having the opposite effect. In the 1970's, it was considered reasonable for government to outright set prices and rates. Today, even subsidies draw strong attack.
To be fair, I agree with much of the agenda of deregulation since the 1970's, so this isn't a criticism of that trend. But I also believe a nation can't do great things if people don't have faith in its basic institutions. It is, to me, one of the most striking differences between the West and the East, and I don't think it's coincidental that societal prosperity is highly correlated with the amount of faith people have in their basic institutions.
[1] Without resorting to the facile false equivalency between campaign donations and outright bribery.
[2] Although not new--it has been described elsewhere that these moods are cyclic.
[3] It can be argued that the government really does act in the interests of upper middle class baby boomers (like my parents).
[4] People will contest this, but it's hard to argue with the facts. From 1970 to 2002, federal spending exclusive of interest, social security, and medicare dropped from 15% of GDP to 10% of GDP. It spiked during the recession, but is trending back towards hitting 10% by early in the next decade. Deregulation has moved similarly. We might complain about lack of competition in telecom today, but in 1970 AT&T was still a sanctioned, national monopoly.
I think that the reason you could make that case is because of the sudden involvement of television and mass media--Korea was similarly unpopular, I think.
"2) Many of the biggest changes in the U.S. since 1970 have been in the direction of deregulation, increased emphasis on markets, and smaller government."
I think the problem is there is a ton of rhetoric about deregulation and smaller government but in practice if you look very close government is mostly much bigger and a lot of the things that have been "deregulated" aren't subject to the competition that deregulation implies because of the nature of the industries involved.
Sure you can deregulate electric rates but you still don't have a choice in who carries that power to your house. On the other hand look at an industry like car dealerships where deregulating would actually improve things and people fight tooth and nail to keep it because they know there is no natural barrier to protect their profits.
I think that's very much it--deregulation for industries where there are high barriers to entry (building roads, running fiber, setting up powerlines) is less useful than for industries without such barriers to industry.
Interesting question, though, is if this logic applies to things like medicine: there isn't any barrier to entry other than buying a scalpel and a stethoscope, and yet I'd much rather have some degree of regulation there.
Interesting question, though, is if this logic applies to things like medicine: there isn't any barrier to entry other than buying a scalpel and a stethoscope
I don't understand your question. I don't think you can put practicing medicine in the "unregulated" column.
So, to clarify: we seem to have stumbled upon the principle of "If an industry has low barriers to entry, it ought to be deregulated".
For medicine, there are low barriers to entry--recall that barbers used to be surgeons. Our heuristic would suggest that medicine shouldn't be regulated--but that's nuts.
Don't know about "medicine" but doctors have been holding back progress for decades because they're a powerful union (though strangely that word isn't used).
I have a friend who is finishing up medical school as a radiologist. The way he explained it is that the rates doctors charge for a given procedure are largely dictated by the government Medicare and Medicaid programs since they are the largest "customers" of healthcare services. Every year or so there is an advisory body of doctors that is part of the AMA in each specialty that gets together and makes recommendations that then get approved by the government. The government pretty much rubber stamps what ever they say. So essentially the AMA is a doctors union that dictates prices.
> I have a friend who is finishing up medical school as a radiologist. The way he explained it is that the rates doctors charge for a given procedure are largely dictated by the government Medicare and Medicaid programs since they are the largest "customers" of healthcare services. Every year or so there is an advisory body of doctors that is part of the AMA in each specialty that gets together and makes recommendations that then get approved by the government.
Actually, its just Medicare (the confusion may be because the governing entity is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but Medicaid is a state-federal partnership program where reimbursement is generally driven by state policy; the committee at issue [1] is related to Medicare specifically.)
In the UK, the NHS was strongly resisted by the BMA (doctor's union basically) in order to get the deal done the Minister of Health, in his own words, had "stuffed their mouths with gold".
At roughly the same time in the US, the current mania about socialized medicine equaling death panels and communism got started with spin doctors hired by the doctor's unions. In fact Wikipedia tells me that the actual phrase "socialized medicine" was "first widely used in the United States by advocates of the American Medical Association in opposition to President Harry S. Truman's 1947 health-care initiative."
The article "The Lie Factory: How politics became a business" gives some interesting historical insight into this:
They continue to lobby against these reforms to this day, more from Wikipedia:
"The AMA has one of the largest political lobbying budgets of any organization in the United States.[6] Its political positions throughout its history have often been controversial. In the 1930s, the AMA attempted to prohibit its members from working for the then-primitive health maintenance organizations that had sprung up during the Great Depression, which violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and resulted in a conviction ultimately affirmed by the US Supreme Court.[7] The AMA's vehement campaign against Medicare in the 1950s and 1960s included the Operation Coffee Cup supported by Ronald Reagan. Since the enactment of Medicare, the AMA reversed its position and now opposes any "cut to Medicare funding or shift [of] increased costs to beneficiaries at the expense of the quality or accessibility of care". However, the AMA remains opposed to any single-payer health care plan that might enact a National Health Service in the United States, such as the United States National Health Care Act. In the 1990s, the organization was part of the coalition that defeated the health care reform advanced by Hillary and Bill Clinton."
They also to fight to protect their status, and prevent nurses, pharmacists and other less-credentialled healthcare workers from performing roles that they could do just as well (if not better) and at cheaper cost. Relevantly for the tech-nerd contingent here (if raising the cost and reducing the quality of health care wasn't already relevant enough), they're probably going to fight expert systems that threaten their turf too (if they haven't already started to) just like car dealers vs Tesla motors.
Here's randomly Googled article on them fighting against an expanded role for Nurses:
"The American Medical Association (AMA) represents many members of the old guard, and is intent on protecting the guild. In some statehouses, the Associated Press (AP) reports: “Doctors have shown up in white coats to testify against nurse practitioner bills. The AMA, which supported the national health care overhaul, says that a doctor should supervise an NP at all times and in all settings. Just because there is a doctor shortage, the AMA argues, is no reason to put nurses in charge and endanger patients.”
But others argue that Nurse Practitioners have the needed training and that, in fact, doctors who have gone through the full medical school curriculum are over-qualified for a job that, today, is more about coordinating care than medical science."
Generalize just a small bit: Despite (potentially) low barriers to entry, medicine hasn't got elastic demand, or a generally well-functioning market for services. It might be possible to fix/change that, but we'd be talking about something very different than medicine today.
Nope. There is still something quite unique to medicine (or at least much more present it) that makes regulation desirable. It's not because prices would go up or down.
During the bootlegger era, it was common for public officials to be quite openly on the take
Is that the measure? That politicians have to be openly on the take for the modern citizen to be justified in distrusting authority? As with most of society, the corruption has better marketing today vs 80 or 90 years ago. Why take an open bribe when it's so easy to funnel money to family and contributors through the passing of bills that include earmarks for them?
now is that trust has been eroded in institutions
We've had the better part of a century to watch as one big program after another has been implemented, limped along sucking more and more money, and now is doomed to failure unless yet more money is thrown after them: Medicare, Social Security, etc.
We've watched the government go to war against poverty and drugs yet fail to move the needle.
We've watched as everything the government gets involved in: public school, health care, student loans, home loans, etc. fails in fundamental ways without ever being scrapped or replaced with something better.
Today, even subsidies draw strong attack
... but then nothing really ever happens about them, or they're shuffled around.
[4] People will contest this, but
Government expenditures != amount and effect of regulation.
So, some old relatives of mine would counter that the fact that they can't bribe public officials anymore is actually somewhat of the problem.
They grew up in the old Chicago machine, and it was well-known that you could take your grievances (as well as perhaps a contribution) to your alderman to get things like potholes fixed or what have you.
I think that the problem isn't necessarily corruption per se, but that it is out of reach of the community members who would benefit most from it.
> 2) Many of the biggest changes in the U.S. since 1970 have been in the direction of deregulation, increased emphasis on markets, and smaller government.[4]
Pretty much every single libertarian I talk to would vehemently disagree here. Drug laws, war on terror, militarization of police, copyright and patent expansion, the massive and growing number of prisoners (more in absolute numbers than China!), money transmitter laws, safety regulations, the NSA, the perpetually growing number of federal and state regulations per year, etc are usually cited (also, many libertarians throw in growing welfare spending, which I'm obliged to include even though I personally find it vastly less offensive than something like throwing black people in jail for a parking ticket). There is actually a good theory that explains the disparity between this and the high-profile deregulation cases: in the case of laws that substantially harm very specific and powerful groups, there is a strong and concentrated interest in repealing them, so they get repealed. On the other hand, in the case of micro-nuisances targeting small entrepreneurs fighting against the law a public goods problem, where each individual person has insufficient incentive to do anything about it.
The problem with your examples is that they ignore the relative impact of different sorts of government interventions. From 1970 to 2002, the non-interest, non-SS/Medicare portion of the budget shrunk from 15% of GDP to 10% of GDP. That's a $750 billion change. E.g. the drug war might be a great injustice, but the entire budget of the federal prison system is only $6-7 billion. The militarization of the police is, economically, more than outweighed by the dramatic shrinking of our actual military. In 1970, there was 1 federal uniformed military person for every 65 people. Today it's 1 for every 203. We might have a war on terror, but back then we had a war on communism, and defense spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen from 8% in 1970 to 5% today. The number of regulations might be more, but that's a worthless measure. The federal administrative bureaucracy writing and overseeing and enforcing those regulations has shrunk dramatically. In 1970, there was 1 federal civilian employee for every 69 people. Today there is 1 for every 117 people.
It looks like that governments are spending less money to enforce it's rules and laws. I think the money spent can be misleading for some cases when determining whether the government has shrink in a given area. For example, it would have been much more expensive in the 1970's to monitor everyone's communications than today, and even if their funding for spying on domestic communications has dropped by, say, 50%, one would hardly argue that the government has reduced it's surveillance in this area. For this case, and I'm sure there are others, spending less money might mean the government has shrunk in terms of number of employees, but it doesn't mean the government has shrunk in terms of power.
We now live in a world where everything we do is recorded, and yes, even used against us (parallel construction). American citizens can be detained indefinitely without trial. The police are becoming militarized and the TSA/DHS is expanding beyond airports into bus stations and train stations. I'm legitimately afraid to cross the border, or use the Internet without Tor browser. And, shocker, I'm feeling completely disillusioned with everything. I know I'm not alone.
AFAIK most of the military equipment going to police departments and the DHS is recycled from wars abroad. The surveillance state is or is becoming fully automated, and I don't see how that will make it anything but cheaper to enact tyranny over the long run. Unmanned drones flying overhead are cheaper than putting cops in helicopters.
To be quite honest, I don't care if the government is spending less money relative to the 1970s, and I don't care whether the financial markets are less regulated. It feels like we live in a police state, that's the fact. That is what I object to, and THAT is why plenty will strongly object to this notion of there being "smaller government" these days. To think that just because it costs less money or requires less regulations to run a full blown surveillance state somehow means today's government is smaller is just utterly absurd.
The problem is that Government hasn't enforced Anti-Trust Laws since 1970. Things are more deregulated but the only companies that can compete are already part of the Fascist state. Do you remember when you had more than 10 choices for Internet? Breaking up monopolies should be a primary function of the US Government. Now it encourages them.
I think a legitimate complaint is that de-regulation is correlated with ex-post regulatory capture. And the same is present in things like media regulation and telco. The 1996 telecom act was gutted by the RBOCs who killed the CLECs and pivoted to roll up the mobile independents. The POTUS vacations withe the CEO from Comcast now. It really doesn't matter the party or the policies. It seems the inevitable conclusion of the process. Similarly the so-called banking de-regulation in the 1990s...that was codified and locked in place via the WTO treaties. This has left us stuck with a neither-here-nor there ability to lighten or strengthen regulations. WIPO and IP issues have been similarly ossified as proponents have tried to "open up" markets for IP.
The issue is that the concept of "size" is very nebulous, and it's very reductionist and misleading to measure that with just money. A good example to make here is that North Korea has no income tax. The undesirable part of the war on terror is not the fact that it wastes a few billion dollars of federal money; it's all of the secondary burdens that it imposes on ordinary people. Airport security at the time was almost nonexistent by comparison to today. The growth of federal prison is not harmful because it imposes $23 worth of taxes per person; it's harmful because, well, it imprisons people. It's $7 billion of money to law enforcement, but 1% of the population is $150 billion lost GDP. If the regulatory authorities become 4x more efficient due to technology and enforce 2x as many regulations at 0.5x the cost, that's not small government. So I think the general way of describing this is that government might be growing smaller in the sense of being less useful, but at the same time larger in the sense of being more intrusive.
That's all nice, but there is significant room for improvement.
In almost every measure of quality of life the US ranks low to middling compared to generally less-wealthy industrialized nations. We score #12 in the human development index, and all our #1s are in bad things like surveillance, military spending, prison population, etc. We don't inherently suck, we just spend vastly more on cops, prosecutors, prisons, soldiers, and surveillance.
The surveillance state does more than delegitimize as discredit the government, it takes vast resources away from providing the good things government can do. Trading individually corrupt and brutal police for militarized and insanely armed police only enables us to say "Tut, tut, but that use of force was legal." That's not an improvement. It just costs more.
> That's all nice, but there is significant room for improvement.
I'm not saying that there isn't, or that criticism isn't valid. I'm pointing out the interesting phenomenon that trust in institutions has eroded even as the institutions have, by objective measures, decreased their intervention into society.
They have deceased their intervention into some businesses, and perhaps with detrimental effect in cases where the markets don't naturally function well. In that case we traded paternalism for false-libertarian corporatism. For example, if you really want competition in Internet services, structural separation, not a deregulation of incumbents, is the way to go.
Mass surveillance is a massive and foul intervention into society. That's a paperless Stasi.
I think that the advancement of the "science" of marketing has left us all jaded. Public figures do not speak like normal humans, they communicate in PR-ese, saying as little as possible with flowery speech.
We're subjected to so much marketing and PR spin that we've become immune to it. Look at Twitter and how that's evolved -- one of their big business models is gathering TV viewer sentiment in real-time. I think that we've all been trained to distrust most things communicated in a public setting, because chances are that somebody is selling something.
Why question whether or not our suspicion is greater or less than it was in some bygone era?
It's like saying, "Cancer survival rates are much better now than they were a hundred years ago, so let's question peoples' motivation for continuing to battle cancer."
Systems that obviate the need for authorities can be just as corrupt* and stupid as the authorities themselves. Systems should be treated with the same level of skepticism as powerful individuals. It's a shame that they usually aren't.
* By "corrupt" I mean that a system arbitrarily facilitates the self-interest of a small group of people over others. Symmetric starting conditions aren't enough; instability breaks initial symmetries faster than a kid breaks toys.
Interestingly, twitter sort of does this, in that it sort of works like a web of trust. One difference is that the main mechanism of trust propagation is endorsement of statements (retweet) rather than endorsement of people (follow).
And don't think you can check it yourself - for 99.9% of people that's impossible. And don't say "so trust that 0.1% of people" because you did nothing except add a layer of indirection.
Well, once the system works it's easy to trust, and it tends to stay that way.
The problem, as jjoonathan said, is when it does not work. I'd say that it's worse than a corrupt politician, because the politician is much easier to replace (if you are not under a system that makes all of them equally corrupt).
It's full of trivia the way only British can write, but I skimmed it, and I guess a rough TLDR is...
Today the establishment (a term invented in the 1950s) can read the mass psychology's wants (via technological means) and fulfil them (directly, in order to remedy popular discontent) instead of engaging in old-school frame-up tactics.
Note that the article doesn't disclaim continued use of these tactics though, so it's not really drawing any particularly informative or useful conclusions.
The entire concept of authority is inherently suspicious. It's so easy to confuse it for people with advantages using their advantages to enjoy their advantages.
It's easy to tack on the word "inherent" here, but it's misused. There's nothing inherently suspicious about authority. The Zeitgeist, though, is so strong that it's difficult to think of counterexamples, and easy to believe that how you perceive it now is how it's always been.
I have no idea what you're saying, so I'll just add to my point. Did authority originate as 'the people' purposefully vesting some of their power into one or more leaders, in order to organize society more effectively? Or is that how we post-rationalize the state we're born into?
While it is ultimately a matter of opinion and personal judgment, mine disagrees with yours.
I do find authority to be inherently suspicious, because it substitutes use of force for the use of rationality, and usually only for the sake of the authority-haver's personal convenience.
If you are correct, and can prove it, no authority is required. Otherwise the authority, if available, is inevitably used to win by rhetorical distraction rather than by the strength of the reasoning. And a swat on the noggin with a baton is very distracting indeed. As they say, you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
That's not to say authority is useless. It is often the only way to achieve timely results. But is is no less suspicious, and should always be ratified by a deliberative, non-authoritative process.
"Assertions to the effect of "the government is bigger than ever" are just unsubstantiated hand-waving. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP, excluding interest, social security, and medicare, is down from 15% to 10%. That reflects a real and dramatic shrinking of the scope of government"
Excluding my fat, belly, and arse, I've actually lost weight...
I exclude those things because they're not generally what people think of when they think "government overhead." They're not rooms full of bureaucrats writing pages of regulations nor are they fat-cat contractors. They're transfer payments with very low bureaucratic overhead. Moreover, at least in the case of Social Security, it represents withdrawals of money previously paid into the system.
Look at it this way. Say a very small, Milton Friedman-ish society institutes a basic income, funded by a tax. It might have spending as a percentage of GDP of 30%, but would you say it necessarily has a "big government?"
Maybe its because I'm economic-y, and while measures of "big" and "small" are relative...yes, yes I would. I'd say of course we have to include that as a measure of how much of a role the government plays in the society. This is with no judgment about whether this is a good/bad thing.
The things you're excluding (though defense wasn't mentioned), are the main/majority expenditure categories of government. There's even good reason to believe that shrinkage in other areas merely come in some part from natural accounting of a substitution effect as expenditure has been transferred to these areas. I can accept that you're excluding them from analysis because they're not what the man on the street thinks of as "government overhead", but whatever is left over can no longer really be said to be representative of the government we actually have or the role it actually plays in our lives and society.
I disagree. A federal bureaucracy that costs $500 billion per year to operate has a very different impact, both socially and economically, than a simple transfer payment of $500 billion within the economy.
Except in reality you cannot ever separate the two. Money doesn't just happen. Transfers don't just happen. There is no "neutral" way of transferring money. Everything has to happen in a context and via a real material existent system of interests and resources playing off one other...
I can comment on a $500 billion "simple transfer" separate from a bureaucracy, government, population and politics of sufficient size and complexity to actually achieve it in the same way that I can comment on how the extra mass of Santa's obesity is hindering him from delivering his presents efficiently at Christmas each year...
Which is to say, forming a serious opinion on it implies ignorance about the true nature of what it is we are discussing (a fantastical non-existent entity and an inherently impossible state of affairs).
Or at the very least it requires a willing suspension of disbelief purely for the purposes of entertainment...
> I'd say of course we have to include that as a measure of how much of a role the government plays in the society. This is with no judgment about whether this is a good/bad thing.
Government has a $10 trillion+ impact on the economy by enforcing property rights, and likely a similarly large one by restricting immigration. Neither of those appear in a "budget". So you really have to be extremely careful about what you mean by "government" and "size".
The impact each government action has on society is obviously very different. Even changing the neighborhood a school is build can completely change the impacts of the spending. And changing spending from some corrupt bureaucracy into some low overhead redistribution program will certainly change the society where those run.
That said, yes, you still have as big[1] a government. Your people will still have to pay the same 30% of the GDP in taxes, and their products will still get more expensive by the same amount.
[1] I'm not sure 30% of the GDP constitutes a big government. In fact, I'm quite certain that number is meaningless without context, but well, I'd love to be proved wrong on that.
Maybe it has something to do with our government killing more Native Americans than the Nazi's killed Jews, imprisoning Japenese Americans during WWII, using nukes, and more recently Orwellian Surveillance and drone strikes against American Citizens without trial.
And these are just the facts. I haven't even gone into any extremely plausible "conspiracy" theories.
It reflects a shifting of necessary government services to debt service used to cover past excesses, and massive shifts of budget $ off books to Social Security especially to fund more recent excesses.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadPlease, can a moderator correct this? Thanks.
What is different,[2] now is that trust has been eroded in institutions. I think people in my parents generation (born in the early 1950's) still believe that government more or less acts in the best interests of the people.[3] I think that belief is a lot less common in my generation, and I'm quite past the age of generic rebelliousness (born mid 1980's).
What strikes me as interesting are two related facts:
1) Those who are the most distrustful of government tend to skew libertarian; but
2) Many of the biggest changes in the U.S. since 1970 have been in the direction of deregulation, increased emphasis on markets, and smaller government.[4]
Measures that should be increasing trust in the system are having the opposite effect. In the 1970's, it was considered reasonable for government to outright set prices and rates. Today, even subsidies draw strong attack.
To be fair, I agree with much of the agenda of deregulation since the 1970's, so this isn't a criticism of that trend. But I also believe a nation can't do great things if people don't have faith in its basic institutions. It is, to me, one of the most striking differences between the West and the East, and I don't think it's coincidental that societal prosperity is highly correlated with the amount of faith people have in their basic institutions.
[1] Without resorting to the facile false equivalency between campaign donations and outright bribery.
[2] Although not new--it has been described elsewhere that these moods are cyclic.
[3] It can be argued that the government really does act in the interests of upper middle class baby boomers (like my parents).
[4] People will contest this, but it's hard to argue with the facts. From 1970 to 2002, federal spending exclusive of interest, social security, and medicare dropped from 15% of GDP to 10% of GDP. It spiked during the recession, but is trending back towards hitting 10% by early in the next decade. Deregulation has moved similarly. We might complain about lack of competition in telecom today, but in 1970 AT&T was still a sanctioned, national monopoly.
I think the problem is there is a ton of rhetoric about deregulation and smaller government but in practice if you look very close government is mostly much bigger and a lot of the things that have been "deregulated" aren't subject to the competition that deregulation implies because of the nature of the industries involved.
Sure you can deregulate electric rates but you still don't have a choice in who carries that power to your house. On the other hand look at an industry like car dealerships where deregulating would actually improve things and people fight tooth and nail to keep it because they know there is no natural barrier to protect their profits.
Interesting question, though, is if this logic applies to things like medicine: there isn't any barrier to entry other than buying a scalpel and a stethoscope, and yet I'd much rather have some degree of regulation there.
I don't understand your question. I don't think you can put practicing medicine in the "unregulated" column.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practicing_without_a_license
For medicine, there are low barriers to entry--recall that barbers used to be surgeons. Our heuristic would suggest that medicine shouldn't be regulated--but that's nuts.
http://swampland.time.com/2013/07/29/the-secretive-group-beh...
Actually, its just Medicare (the confusion may be because the governing entity is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but Medicaid is a state-federal partnership program where reimbursement is generally driven by state policy; the committee at issue [1] is related to Medicare specifically.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialty_Society_Relative_Valu...
At roughly the same time in the US, the current mania about socialized medicine equaling death panels and communism got started with spin doctors hired by the doctor's unions. In fact Wikipedia tells me that the actual phrase "socialized medicine" was "first widely used in the United States by advocates of the American Medical Association in opposition to President Harry S. Truman's 1947 health-care initiative."
The article "The Lie Factory: How politics became a business" gives some interesting historical insight into this:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/24/120924fa_fact_...
They continue to lobby against these reforms to this day, more from Wikipedia:
"The AMA has one of the largest political lobbying budgets of any organization in the United States.[6] Its political positions throughout its history have often been controversial. In the 1930s, the AMA attempted to prohibit its members from working for the then-primitive health maintenance organizations that had sprung up during the Great Depression, which violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and resulted in a conviction ultimately affirmed by the US Supreme Court.[7] The AMA's vehement campaign against Medicare in the 1950s and 1960s included the Operation Coffee Cup supported by Ronald Reagan. Since the enactment of Medicare, the AMA reversed its position and now opposes any "cut to Medicare funding or shift [of] increased costs to beneficiaries at the expense of the quality or accessibility of care". However, the AMA remains opposed to any single-payer health care plan that might enact a National Health Service in the United States, such as the United States National Health Care Act. In the 1990s, the organization was part of the coalition that defeated the health care reform advanced by Hillary and Bill Clinton."
They also to fight to protect their status, and prevent nurses, pharmacists and other less-credentialled healthcare workers from performing roles that they could do just as well (if not better) and at cheaper cost. Relevantly for the tech-nerd contingent here (if raising the cost and reducing the quality of health care wasn't already relevant enough), they're probably going to fight expert systems that threaten their turf too (if they haven't already started to) just like car dealers vs Tesla motors.
Here's randomly Googled article on them fighting against an expanded role for Nurses:
http://takingnote.tcf.org/2010/04/the-battle-over-letting-nu...
"The American Medical Association (AMA) represents many members of the old guard, and is intent on protecting the guild. In some statehouses, the Associated Press (AP) reports: “Doctors have shown up in white coats to testify against nurse practitioner bills. The AMA, which supported the national health care overhaul, says that a doctor should supervise an NP at all times and in all settings. Just because there is a doctor shortage, the AMA argues, is no reason to put nurses in charge and endanger patients.”
But others argue that Nurse Practitioners have the needed training and that, in fact, doctors who have gone through the full medical school curriculum are over-qualified for a job that, today, is more about coordinating care than medical science."
Is that the measure? That politicians have to be openly on the take for the modern citizen to be justified in distrusting authority? As with most of society, the corruption has better marketing today vs 80 or 90 years ago. Why take an open bribe when it's so easy to funnel money to family and contributors through the passing of bills that include earmarks for them?
now is that trust has been eroded in institutions
We've had the better part of a century to watch as one big program after another has been implemented, limped along sucking more and more money, and now is doomed to failure unless yet more money is thrown after them: Medicare, Social Security, etc.
We've watched the government go to war against poverty and drugs yet fail to move the needle.
We've watched as everything the government gets involved in: public school, health care, student loans, home loans, etc. fails in fundamental ways without ever being scrapped or replaced with something better.
Today, even subsidies draw strong attack
... but then nothing really ever happens about them, or they're shuffled around.
[4] People will contest this, but
Government expenditures != amount and effect of regulation.
They grew up in the old Chicago machine, and it was well-known that you could take your grievances (as well as perhaps a contribution) to your alderman to get things like potholes fixed or what have you.
I think that the problem isn't necessarily corruption per se, but that it is out of reach of the community members who would benefit most from it.
Pretty much every single libertarian I talk to would vehemently disagree here. Drug laws, war on terror, militarization of police, copyright and patent expansion, the massive and growing number of prisoners (more in absolute numbers than China!), money transmitter laws, safety regulations, the NSA, the perpetually growing number of federal and state regulations per year, etc are usually cited (also, many libertarians throw in growing welfare spending, which I'm obliged to include even though I personally find it vastly less offensive than something like throwing black people in jail for a parking ticket). There is actually a good theory that explains the disparity between this and the high-profile deregulation cases: in the case of laws that substantially harm very specific and powerful groups, there is a strong and concentrated interest in repealing them, so they get repealed. On the other hand, in the case of micro-nuisances targeting small entrepreneurs fighting against the law a public goods problem, where each individual person has insufficient incentive to do anything about it.
AFAIK most of the military equipment going to police departments and the DHS is recycled from wars abroad. The surveillance state is or is becoming fully automated, and I don't see how that will make it anything but cheaper to enact tyranny over the long run. Unmanned drones flying overhead are cheaper than putting cops in helicopters.
To be quite honest, I don't care if the government is spending less money relative to the 1970s, and I don't care whether the financial markets are less regulated. It feels like we live in a police state, that's the fact. That is what I object to, and THAT is why plenty will strongly object to this notion of there being "smaller government" these days. To think that just because it costs less money or requires less regulations to run a full blown surveillance state somehow means today's government is smaller is just utterly absurd.
In almost every measure of quality of life the US ranks low to middling compared to generally less-wealthy industrialized nations. We score #12 in the human development index, and all our #1s are in bad things like surveillance, military spending, prison population, etc. We don't inherently suck, we just spend vastly more on cops, prosecutors, prisons, soldiers, and surveillance.
The surveillance state does more than delegitimize as discredit the government, it takes vast resources away from providing the good things government can do. Trading individually corrupt and brutal police for militarized and insanely armed police only enables us to say "Tut, tut, but that use of force was legal." That's not an improvement. It just costs more.
I'm not saying that there isn't, or that criticism isn't valid. I'm pointing out the interesting phenomenon that trust in institutions has eroded even as the institutions have, by objective measures, decreased their intervention into society.
Mass surveillance is a massive and foul intervention into society. That's a paperless Stasi.
We're subjected to so much marketing and PR spin that we've become immune to it. Look at Twitter and how that's evolved -- one of their big business models is gathering TV viewer sentiment in real-time. I think that we've all been trained to distrust most things communicated in a public setting, because chances are that somebody is selling something.
Why question whether or not our suspicion is greater or less than it was in some bygone era?
It's like saying, "Cancer survival rates are much better now than they were a hundred years ago, so let's question peoples' motivation for continuing to battle cancer."
* By "corrupt" I mean that a system arbitrarily facilitates the self-interest of a small group of people over others. Symmetric starting conditions aren't enough; instability breaks initial symmetries faster than a kid breaks toys.
And don't think you can check it yourself - for 99.9% of people that's impossible. And don't say "so trust that 0.1% of people" because you did nothing except add a layer of indirection.
The problem, as jjoonathan said, is when it does not work. I'd say that it's worse than a corrupt politician, because the politician is much easier to replace (if you are not under a system that makes all of them equally corrupt).
Today the establishment (a term invented in the 1950s) can read the mass psychology's wants (via technological means) and fulfil them (directly, in order to remedy popular discontent) instead of engaging in old-school frame-up tactics.
Note that the article doesn't disclaim continued use of these tactics though, so it's not really drawing any particularly informative or useful conclusions.
I do find authority to be inherently suspicious, because it substitutes use of force for the use of rationality, and usually only for the sake of the authority-haver's personal convenience.
If you are correct, and can prove it, no authority is required. Otherwise the authority, if available, is inevitably used to win by rhetorical distraction rather than by the strength of the reasoning. And a swat on the noggin with a baton is very distracting indeed. As they say, you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
That's not to say authority is useless. It is often the only way to achieve timely results. But is is no less suspicious, and should always be ratified by a deliberative, non-authoritative process.
Excluding my fat, belly, and arse, I've actually lost weight...
Look at it this way. Say a very small, Milton Friedman-ish society institutes a basic income, funded by a tax. It might have spending as a percentage of GDP of 30%, but would you say it necessarily has a "big government?"
The things you're excluding (though defense wasn't mentioned), are the main/majority expenditure categories of government. There's even good reason to believe that shrinkage in other areas merely come in some part from natural accounting of a substitution effect as expenditure has been transferred to these areas. I can accept that you're excluding them from analysis because they're not what the man on the street thinks of as "government overhead", but whatever is left over can no longer really be said to be representative of the government we actually have or the role it actually plays in our lives and society.
I can comment on a $500 billion "simple transfer" separate from a bureaucracy, government, population and politics of sufficient size and complexity to actually achieve it in the same way that I can comment on how the extra mass of Santa's obesity is hindering him from delivering his presents efficiently at Christmas each year...
Which is to say, forming a serious opinion on it implies ignorance about the true nature of what it is we are discussing (a fantastical non-existent entity and an inherently impossible state of affairs).
Or at the very least it requires a willing suspension of disbelief purely for the purposes of entertainment...
Government has a $10 trillion+ impact on the economy by enforcing property rights, and likely a similarly large one by restricting immigration. Neither of those appear in a "budget". So you really have to be extremely careful about what you mean by "government" and "size".
That said, yes, you still have as big[1] a government. Your people will still have to pay the same 30% of the GDP in taxes, and their products will still get more expensive by the same amount.
[1] I'm not sure 30% of the GDP constitutes a big government. In fact, I'm quite certain that number is meaningless without context, but well, I'd love to be proved wrong on that.
I'm Canadian and find that often Canadians believe our government is doing fine and is trustworthy, simply because of Canada's supposed reputation.
And these are just the facts. I haven't even gone into any extremely plausible "conspiracy" theories.