<story><title>Why is American administrative capacity in decline?</title><url>https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/why-is-american-administrative-capacity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swearwolf</author><text>I have a theory about this: the idea that, as Reagan put it, &amp;quot;The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are: I&amp;#x27;m from the government, and I&amp;#x27;m here to help&amp;quot; have become so deeply embedded in our national consciousness that almost nobody, on the left or right, really believes that the government can be a force for good anymore. Because it&amp;#x27;s so deeply embedded, I think it&amp;#x27;s become self fulfilling prophecy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rootusrootus</author><text>The right assumes the government is incompetent, and then crafts policy to kneecap government at every opportunity.&lt;p&gt;The left assumes the government could be competent, but only if everyone tries to make it so, and they know what the right is doing (all of this policy is completely aboveboard and public).&lt;p&gt;Net result, everyone can safely assume the government is incompetent.  It is much easier to prevent it from working than to make it work.  We&amp;#x27;d have to have bipartisan interest in making it work effectively, and we do not have that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why is American administrative capacity in decline?</title><url>https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/why-is-american-administrative-capacity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swearwolf</author><text>I have a theory about this: the idea that, as Reagan put it, &amp;quot;The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are: I&amp;#x27;m from the government, and I&amp;#x27;m here to help&amp;quot; have become so deeply embedded in our national consciousness that almost nobody, on the left or right, really believes that the government can be a force for good anymore. Because it&amp;#x27;s so deeply embedded, I think it&amp;#x27;s become self fulfilling prophecy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ok123456</author><text>Sure there are. You have a huge faction of the government that loves complex, baroque technocratic solutions to everything because they&amp;#x27;ve convinced themselves that complexity justifies their power.&lt;p&gt;We needed healthcare reform. What we got was the ACA.&lt;p&gt;What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????&lt;p&gt;Average peoples&amp;#x27; material conditions are getting worse and worse. They need some kind of simple universal assistance. They don&amp;#x27;t need yet another way of getting means tested.</text></comment>